An Inquiry beneath the Visiblel
Essay by Léa Bismuth, 2020
Is Isabelle Giovacchini a photographer? One might be tempted to preclude this. But then one should add that she practices photography to better carry out technical experiments and combinations of poetic gestures, constantly pushing the medium to its limits. In March 2021, her research on Lake Nemi entitled L'Esprit du lieu (Genius Loci) led her to Milan. She is in residence until June at the Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France (CPIF, Pontault-Combault) for research and post-production on the same project. Finally, this summer, while based for several weeks in Italy with the support of the French Institute and the Villa Medici, she will attend the next archaeological excavations of the lake.
Experimenting is transgressing. It also means revealing a visibility that is not detectable to the naked eye. The technical operation that engages in this sense is a leap into the unknown, with uncertain boundaries. From the still image to moving images, everything can become at the same time a subject for manipulation and an object of fascination. Speaking of obsession is not excessive: it is a question of unearthing the signs of an unnamed investigation, through several parallel paths of investigation, from the archive to the field study. Clues have been concealed and it is up to the artist to find them again, adopting a subversive method, that is to say, an active search for what is beneath, under the surface and under the skin of the visible. The ambition is to reveal what lies beyond appearances.
Searching for light
A story comes to mind: that of a child locked in a cupboard by punitive parents. “This form of punishment lost its terror when I found a solution. I hid a torch with a red and green light in a corner of the cupboard. When I was shut in, I hunted out my torch, directed the beam of light at the wall and pretended I was at the cinema.” I thought about this scene for a long time, the child thwarting the wound by inventing a world of bright and colourful shadows. Cinema, as a waking dream, is indeed the twilight and secret chamber from which images are born and flourish. This is the childhood story of Ingmar Bergman [1918-2007], who later became the filmmaker we know today. If it is an object of reminiscence, it is because Isabelle Giovacchini's work is imbued with a quest for wonder as well as dazzle, to make the invisible speak, to reveal the unseen, and to dialogue with an ever-flush elusiveness. Is the magic lantern a saving escape and a way to ward off fate? Seeing Ambre (Amber) (2006), one of the first installations, consisting of the enlargement of a piece of amber in a slide projector, I think indeed of the flames dancing on the walls of caves and the invention of cinema.
Is Bergman not a reader of his Swedish compatriot Auguste Strindberg [1849-1912], who was a writer and playwright, but also a great photographic experimenter? Strindberg's discovery was decisive for Isabelle Giovacchini, who drew from him a taste for experience and the invisible, the distant and the unconscious. All this resonates in La Sonate des Spectres (The Sonata of the Spectres) which she stages by going beyond the legible and the visible. Strindberg tried very early on to photograph the stars without a camera and worked with pinhole cameras. Consorting with the occult, he also sought to probe souls through portraiture. Strindberg's attempts to photograph clouds are of course echoed in the series Mehr Licht (Nuages) (Mehr Licht (Clouds)) (2012), latent photograms of clouds with rosy hues, milky forms on the verge of disappearing. Strindberg, like Giovacchini, thus operates by oxymoron, between "rational mysticism" and "naturalism of the invisible". Here, everything is on the edge, on the point of, at the threshold: Vanishing Points, Quid sit lumen, Leçon de ténèbres (Lesson of Darkness), the titles of the works are the chapters of a tale that is built step by step, at the point of intersection of illusion and reality.
Du Mercantour à Nemi, obsédante Méditerranée
Since 2013, Isabelle Giovacchini has integrated a geographical dimension into her approach. Quand fond la neige (When Melts the Snow) (2013-2017) is a walk through the lakes of the Mercantour National Park, located in the South-East of France. Its main subject is the surface area of the region's lakes, whose names and legends immediately conjure up a powerful imagination: the Black Lake, the Devil's Lakes... If you see them on tourist sites, these lakes are a delight to walk around in the mountains. This is precisely where the hijacking comes in: after retrieving shots from the National Park's photo library, the artist erases the lakes from the surface of the image using potassium ferrocyanide. By manipulation, she also obtains enlarged black and white images, revealing their material. The lakes are now nothing more than immaculate white gaps, like the focal point of an absence, in the heart of the by now lunar landscape. The rough, mountainous slopes end in craters and stand out against a grainy sky. Shortly after completing this series, and continuing her exploration of the hinterland of Nice, the artist-walker creates an invisible performance by scattering in the landscape casts of small star-shaped fossils once present in the region: Atlas des étoiles (Star Atlas) (2018) is a conceptual gesture of offering.
Following the trail of the lakes - and in a perimeter whose landscape remains clearly Mediterranean, also calling to the artist's origins - we find ourselves in Nemi, Italy, on the shores of a volcanic lake not far from Rome. Nemi, this eminently charged place, has been the sanctuary of the goddess Diana since ancient times. During the reign of Caligula, the site was home to gigantic ships, all of which sank and disappeared in the depths of the lake on the death of the emperor. In 1929, after the lake was emptied, the mythical ships were found, and archaeological excavations began under the leadership of Mussolini. During a period of residence at Villa Medici in 2020, Isabelle Giovacchini was able to explore the lake and begin to draw up an inventory, which is still far from complete, based on the archives of the lake excavations, kept at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, and made available to the artist for this work. This work, provisionally entitled L’Esprit du lieu (Genius Loci), is already materialising in the form of work-fragments of a story under construction: we can mention Le Miroir de Diane (The Mirror of Diana) (2020), a ready-made silver postcard of Lake Nemi; or Longue vue (Distant View), the assembly of two postcards depicting the lake around 1930. Études d'un culte (Studies of a Cult) (a series of ten photographs, 2020), literally revolves around a votive statue, to better unravel its secret. Inhabited by the presence of reflections on the surface of the picture, the last eight images of the series are nevertheless glowing red: this colour is obtained by placing the finger of the hand on the flash at the time of shooting, which gives flesh to the image, embodies it, while imparting a sacrificial dimension. A labyrinthine story therefore remains to be written, mixing real samples and kaleidoscopic sources. And we will have grasped that this method of investigation on the lookout for the sensitive will undoubtedly open up a possible fiction.
Léa Bismuth
Born in 1983, Léa Bismuth is a writer, art critic and curator. She is a specialist in the thought of Georges Bataille, to whom she devoted a curatorial cycle, La Traversée des Inquiétudes (Labanque, Béthune, from 2016 to 2019) and the book La Besogne des Images (Editions Filigranes, 2019). She has conceived exhibitions for the Musée Delacroix, the BAL, the Rencontres d’Arles, the Drawing Lab, the URDLA, the Tanneries, or the Nouvelles Vagues of the Palais de Tokyo. |
