#1242, ‘… and they could see the stars again’,photograph, 2019
Aldobranti is an artist, whose work centres on a conceptual photography often approached through performance. His work has been shown throughout the UK, Portugal and the US. More recently, edizioni Fosco Fornio have published research monographs and curated collections in support of his research. In previous lives he has been a working mathematician, a Chartered Engineer, a collaborating partner on EU funded projects, IT consultant, a marketing director and a unicyclist.
Aldobranti has an MA Fine Art with Distinction from Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, graduate and postgraduate degrees in Mathematics.
Tell me about your art practice and interests?
Around the tail end of 2010 I saw an exhibition of camera-less photography at The Victoria & Albert Museum with the title “Shadow Catchers” and I found myself wondering how I might catch a shadow and what would the performance of that chase and capture look like?
I work in old-style analog film, I do my own wet chemistry and 95% of the images I turn out are in monochrome but I do cheat and scan the negatives for printing from electronic files. I don’t touch up the scans to remove dust specks and stray fluff to retain this physical provenance.
After a while I got the hang of jumping off the deck of my work bench, sunlight behind me, camera in hand and firing the shutter for an eighth of a second while I was in free fall. Because the camera and I didn’t move much relative to each other the image of my shadow remains quite distinct though the earth below is blurred by our motion.
The shadow of the self is metaphysically quite a complicated character and this gets quite neatly summarised in the terms of psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s Shadow archetype. This archetype carries the burden of those character traits that we least like to admit to in ourselves. Jung counsels strongly to come to terms with our own Shadow personality and notes that the Shadow can often be a source of creativity and imaginative action for change.
Notwithstanding Jung, those negative traits are frequently projected, in psychoanalytic terms onto other people and in Western culture we can find the shadow helplessly entangled with the Other. By the way, it is interesting to note that the shadow of the person does not figure in East Asian visual culture...
My practice as a visual artist has thus become almost entirely research driven: as I studied more about the shadow, I found rich reserves of ideas in intersubjectivity, the study of relationships between people as peer subjects. Intersubjectivity can be seen to be a contrast to solipsism.
#157, shadow jumping,scan from film negative, 2013
How is lockdown for you?
I can own up to the fact that for the first several weeks I could not tell you what day of the week it was nor how many weeks we had been in lockdown. It was however quite a useful hiatus as I needed to put a writing project together with the illustrations for a book* which I then was able to get off to the printers.
And then I found that the discipline of lockdown could be an agent for causing me to stick on target for finishing off all those silly odds-and-ends of jobs I should have finished years ago. Glitches on my website. Sorting out my negatives. Learning several new software modules.
So on the whole, productive but I should so much like to cycle out to a country pub.
#1052, ‘recreating the myth ofButades, performance with laser pointer,
record on analogue film, 2017.
What are you currently working towards or on?
My reading on intersubjectivity brought me into contact with the writing of Paul Ricoeur(Oneself as Another ) who had also written about Time and Narrative, it seems to me that our experience of Time proceeds through our interactions with other people, mediated by the interaction of our personal narrative streams. I am thinking of avisualisationof these interactions as the vortices that form in the water as two ships come close together. Our narrative identity might be carried onthe perimeterof our persons as the Kalanchoe plant “Mother of Thousands” carries its child plantlets on the edges of its leaves. There’s an image there, somewhere...
Do you have a maxim or advice to yourself (that gets you working)?
What don’t I understand? What do I not know?
Links:
*Critical Moss: Art as Independence https://bit.ly/2B0vVx1 ISBN-13: 9781999584733 £14.99 ex warehouse from EFFTE: admin@aldobranti.org
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