AFTER NATURE / AGAINST NATURE
2024 - ongoing
“After Nature / Against Nature” is a reflection on the possibility of going simultaneously After Nature and Against Nature, based on a suggestion given by the books with the same titles by W.G. Sebald (After Nature / Nach der Natur) and J.K. Huysmans (Against Nature / À Rebours). Upon arriving on the Île de Vassivière, I noticed that the landscape seemed rather familiar, although I was not exactly sure why. I had never been to this part of France and most, if not all, of the French cinematography I know does not have this area as a location. Nevertheless, I recognised it. I knew that the lake is artificial, so perhaps that could be the reason. I have never been to North America, but the resemblance was striking, the imagery of Canada and the northern United States conveyed through film, television and photography. I tried to work keeping in mind to go after nature and against it at the same time, but nature here does both autonomously. It is total nature and fiction and destruction, absence of nature or origin of nature. Ultimately, I found myself in France, with a North American landscape, on an island with an Aldo Rossi building and constant rain that reminds me of both my region in Italy, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and the United Kingdom. Perhaps the concept of unheimliche heimat, with which I have recently come into contact in my research, especially in authors such as W.G. Sebald, Peter Handke, and to a certain extent Thomas Bernhard; a concept that is untranslatable but can be interpreted as a home (in the sense of a homeland) that is disturbing, eerie, mysterious or, above all, perturbing, is after all well-founded. Not being able to get lost in the sense of the classical traveller who gets lost in order to find his way home, which is impossible in today’s world, these authors show how our disorientations never lead to new discoveries, but only to a series of uncanny intertextual returns. The traveller, and by extension the artist, however far he may go, can never leave his home, the origin.
Unbound A4 common office paper laser-printed dummy, with 10 accompanying unbound A5 common office paper inkjet-printed booklets.
Plus a series of inkjet-printed photographs on glossy photographic paper, some drawn on with Mitsubishi 7600 Dermatograph pencils, mounted singularly or in dyptichs on A5 sketch pad bamboo paper and A3+ matt coated paper, respectively.
Text on cover by W.G. Sebald, inside the italian edition of Nach der Natur, 2009, Adelphi, translated by Ada Vigliani.
Project developed during the residence at the Château de l’Île de Vassivière, with the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage (CIAPV), as part of the Nuovo Grand Tour project by Institut Français Italia and the Italian Ministry of Culture, with Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Parigi.