BY STEVE BISSON
1. Tell us about your current photographic research?
My current research is more about the language rather than about a specific topic or story . In the last two years I began an exploration’s process. Starting from the documentary photography I’m investigating other approaches to the images as the use of the archive, the appropriation and manipulation of documents. In my next project I would like to use also sculpture and audio-visual installation.
2. Let’s talk about the project ‘Big Sky Hunting’?
Big Sky Hunting is a fictional exploration of the outer space and it’s a journey into the space of representation. In today’s world, the images of space to which we have access, are extremely detailed and available to all via the internet. However, few realise that these images are not the product of a camera in the traditional sense of the word, but the extrapolation of data from electromagnetic waves to a receiver that are then interpreted and constructed by scientists. This interpretation, though rooted in science, remains human and therefore open to error and false perception. The project places the emphasis on the human mind’s capacity to create and imagine that which it wants to see, or better yet, that which it desires in order to create a protective shell
Big Sky Hunting maps unexplored territories, describes cold and perfect technologies and narrates futures already lived and constituted. This photographic representation is an illusion. Rather, it is the result of the appropriation and manipulation of various elements; the use of various 20th century materials such as original images, modified documents and archaic information. Big Sky Hunting It is an attempt to construct a new imagination for the Universe, documented through constellations of mould, vegetable planets and ancient maps.
The Big Sky Hunter elaborates, enhances and modifies the visual effect, deliberately not distinguishing between reality and fiction. Remaining within ambiguity, using error and paradox as fixed coordinates, in order to codify an imaginary chaos and, therefore, the Cosmos.
3. How did you get the idea for the book?
Big Sky Hunting has seen many phases but since the beginning it has been imagined to be a book. My partner Teresa Piardi is a graphic designer interested in book making and a collector of materials and papers. We wanted to to make a book since a long time and in 2013 we produced a first version of Big Sky Hunting as an artist book.
We want to do a proper book though and the turning point was when we were invited to submit a dummy to the Mack First Book Award. We built the book pretty much as you can see it today in three weeks.
4. It’s your first monography. How did you choose the editor ÉDITIONS DU LIC? How did you managed it?
It was luck. Milo Montelli of Skinnerboox, the co-publisher of Big Sky Hunting, had the chance to show the dummy to Nicholas McLean, the founder of Edition Du Lic. I guess was love at first sight. He contacted me and we began the journey together.
5. What did your learn from this experience, plus and minus?
Plus: Making a book it’s a complex, challenging, beautiful process.
It’s a matter of details, every inch is important and It requires every inch of you. At the end it come to life and the object is there. The feeling is quite beyond words and I’m still trying to figured it out.
Minus: None
6. Plans for the future?
Right now we’re planning some events to promote the book and I’m working on an exhibition project which will have a different form from the book.
7. Can you suggest us 3 photography books that you liked?
I rather list three book I just had the chance to see at Paris Photo and I really liked:
- Sequester by Awoiska Van Der Molen
- Disguise and Deception by Anika Schwarzlose
- H. said he loved us by Tommaso Tanini
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INFO
750 copies
96 pages, 57 colour plates
Translucent tip-in pages
Silkscreen UV varnish pages
Foreword by Stafano Graziani
20.5 cm x 25.0 cm
Hot foil embossed hardcover with French fold dust cover
Offset printing
Éditions du LIC 2014
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