Critical texts

One step follows another as, one by one, I look at Giuliana Laportella's images. And it is as though the slow movement of coming and going followed a dead time of absences and distances. Every photograph is an instant "bitten" out of a temporal emptiness that turns the place, the thing, the person photographed into no one's object. Photographs set out in search of a missing dream, where reality is in truth adrift from itself.

Waitings and silences brought out by whites, blacks and greys that branch across the frame, composing lights and shadows that suspend everything in the rarefied limbo preceding an action — where the framing, never bent on deforming the real, refers at once to something else. Photographs that bear no relation to one another, neither of place nor of subject, yet which together bring out the atmosphere of something that is there and is being photographed: the dead season of love.

Giuliana Laportella's lens is able to grasp this "vertigo" that belongs to our everyday life, to our proceeding by absences and to our inability to seize the true; and it creates images that surprise, photographs that generate that poetry of the gaze which, when recognised, is a little like finding the moon again in the bonfires, and that ancient resistance which makes of one's own expression an act of conscience.

Giuliana Laportella thus exposes herself to a formal and poetic work of undoubted force, testimony to an inner vision in which the photographic shot detonates all the lost sense of a reality here expressed as a no man's land. Landscapes of a poetic world that is searching, moving from one place to another; and when the lens catches the only human figure present in the exhibition, there she is — bowler hat and bathing costume, with a dancing, ungainly step — in surreal flight from the lens itself, as in Keaton's films, where every escape has the gift of being surreal and true within the time and place of the framed instant.

The sensitivity to catch absences-presences makes Terra di Nessuno an intense work made with passion, with the love and the pain of someone seeking an expressive path capable of relating her own poetic world to the fleeting, inattentive, mute and loveless reality that surrounds us. Towards a vision that recovers the pleasure of looking.

"This is an exhibition on the theme of war. War exists; we must not wage it." These are Giuliana Laportella's words in presenting the photographs that make up Terra di Nessuno.

But what has war to do with the images passing before us? The images we see are familiar; they do not portray unknown places or unknown people, but represent the places and the world we inhabit. We recognise aspects of our own everyday life and, strangely, we do not feel in accord with them. The everyday suddenly appears, in fact, in its real aspect.

A reality that Giuliana Laportella carries with her, that she takes on as her own burden: she gathers the fragments of life in order to represent its conflicts. These are passages that hurt, but they are necessary in order to come back into accord with reality and to take it in as knowledge.

Everything emerges from an inner rhythm, from the harmony Giuliana Laportella has been able to establish with the world — untying the knots that public and private constraints, pressing upon us, impose; revealing the boxes into which each of us is confined; often finding the subtle irony that life's conventions present to us and that we tacitly accept. The impulses of rebellion that necessarily surface in some of these works affirm once again a struggle waged under the sign of irony which is, with absolute certainty, an expression of the liveliness and the mobility of intelligence.

(…) And Giuliana is there taking her photograph, before the train arrives. It is a non-night that opens before Giuliana's lens. The risks of the obvious and of cliché are many, and could creep into the eye… K. as thought, and the notes of Mozart's Requiem, cross the tracks that remain once the train has passed.

The journey becomes dream, image, idea and body: thus is born, in Giuliana Laportella's photography, the joy of setting out to discover the territory of memory, something and someone that belongs to us all. Kafka — and everything unfolds "as though it had love in its body".

It is not a matter of strolling or of finding more or fewer places, nor is the interest in documenting something: photography is understood here as a slow process of building something that lies within, something that then asks for the embrace and the encounter with other visions, in an attempt to make the journey an element of meeting and of stimulus. This is what Giuliana did in departing, in photographing, in bringing together Kafka's stories, in taking into this intimate journey both Vito and myself, and all the others who took part in the composition of that other journey which is the book.

With intuition and method — where method means not only photographing but entering right into the photographic process, that is, the darkroom — Giuliana creates photographs that arrest and construct instants, fragments of something else: walls, posters bearing the icon-face of Franz Kafka, shadows, people, structures and architectures of light and of its absence, as if photography, in retracing the usual steps, in truth wanted to suspend the sense of the journey.

K. is everywhere. Giuliana Laportella enters the silence of the sirens, climbs up over the rooftops, almost turns somersaults into the india-ink mark, at times within the stroke of Kafka's drawing; and then, how could one not take a shot at the grave… and still more steps, more gazes, more love… "For someone must watch, they say. Someone must watch, they say. Someone must be present."

With Giuliana, a photographer by art, I, Vito, a poet by art, gladly exchange words about what lies deep. We look for interpenetrations of spirit, under the sign of creative excipients that emblematically represent a constant hypothesis of a group in the making, of multimedia culture and — as the great Charles Baudelaire said, yesterday — a critical enquiry into the correspondances des sens. From our dialogues there almost always follows a genetic act of aesthetic invention. Some months ago Giuliana realised that certain aspects of her photographic research resembled, through formal equivalence, the operations of poetic composition. She asked me to define these aspects, and together we arrived at a definition of her shots: lines of verse originated from free phonemes — from which the Fotofonemi were born. Short poems in photographic verse, inspired by the thing-world of the Superfluous, which has revealed itself marginalised and excluded by ruthless mercantile laws. But what surprised us most is that I translated her shots as though they were true poems. A successful Baudelairean operation. A unitary and osmotic art, not merely multimedia.

A beach towel spread on the sand, and a meditation on the meaning of private property. A heap of wooden crates after the market, and the narrative suggestion of an orderly queue waiting for something. A street lamp and a loudspeaker set side by side, triggering a digressive reflection on seeing and hearing.

Giuliana Laportella photographs, and Vito Riviello draws from those visions a series of poetic correspondences that amplify their sense of a vague, ironic metaphysics. Paesaggi di passaggio has the particular merit of a lightness, of a shrewd and attentive grace, of a subtle mirroring in which neither expression acts in subordination to the other, but feeds on it, amplifying itself through continuous reflections.

In the end it matters little who inspired whom. Poetic unity has been achieved; and that is what counts.

Giuliana Laportella is a very young (…). Of her, what will be said is what her photographs tell us and what this book now tells us — a book that unfolds, to my mind, under the sign of rhythmic seriality, translated into lines of verse in which seriality becomes word, and the expectation of seriality becomes rhyme.

The frame of the photograph cuts across the seriality, thereby multiplying the infinity of surprise and of poetic wonder.

Seriality is often horizontal, and translates into a horizontality of the word; it is vertical, pressing to the very limit of a closed shutter, and is in turn translated, carried further by Riviello, into a vertical stack of lines; it is sinuous in grey-and-white curves of colour or in straight lines, to which the downbeat of a conductor off-camera gives, with a light snap, the rhythm of a march.

"Space, for me, is less important, less valuable, than time. Not because it's inferior, but because it's a thing, whereas time is an idea about a thing. Given a choice between a thing and an idea, one should always choose the idea, I think."
Joseph Brodsky, Flight from Byzantium

"Penelope is travelling, vanished
Vanished her landing place …"

Artist of image and word, made into one aesthetically coherent, semantically inseparable whole, Giuliana Laportella places her refined work between time and memory in an unusual perspective, and steers time — the last frontier — under the sign of Penelope, icon of patient waiting, who is both steadfastness and change.

Without contradiction: for in making and unmaking, Penelope governs time, does with it as she pleases. And indeed now she is gone, truly departed. It is useless to look for her — even her landing place does not exist, like a memory that reappears and slips away again, governed by secret processes.

To plough through memories, to feel time freed from a fierce and banal linearity, to perceive its essence as circle and spiral, thanks to the skilful juxtaposition of old photographs rescued from oblivion, new images created by the artist, and the counterpoint of measured, exact words: like Penelope with weft and warp, Giuliana Laportella takes away and adds, composing passages and landscapes of time and within time, translated for us into a space of vision and sharing.

A space that frames, neither defined nor given; a space that always leads elsewhere, because the artist invites us to the difficult, exhilarating exercise of freedom — impossible to escape, because beauty, even when it unsettles and seduces, is a fertile medium, a powerful impulse.

Because beauty moves us, and Giuliana Laportella's works are emotion. Nothing fixes an object, a face, an individuality, the way a photograph does, undeniably giving it a unique dimension. It is not us, and yet there is always something of us in every face portrayed; it does not speak of us, and yet it says something that concerns us.

Images and stories, held together, form a single truth, recovering lost narratives with a seer's eye.