A text by John Berger

"La Rabbia is a film of love. Yet its lucidity is comparable to that pf Kafka's aphorism: 'The Good is, in a certain sense, comfortless.'

This is why I say Pasolini was like an angel.

The film lasts only an hour, an hour that was fashioned, measured, edited forty years ago. And it is in such contrast to the news commentaries we watch and the information fed to us now, that when the hour is over, you tell yourself that it is not only the animal and plant species which are being destroyed or made extinct today, but also set after set of human priorities. The latter are systematically sprayed, not with pesticides, but with ethicides - agents that kill ethics and therefore any notion of history and justice.

Particulary targeted are those of our priorities which have evolved from the human need for sharing, bequeathing, consoling, mourning and hoping. And the ethicides are sprayed day and night by the mass news media.

The ethicides are perhaps less effective, less speedy than the controllers hoped, but they have suceeded in burying and covering up the imaginative space that any central public forum represents and requires. (Our forums are everywhere but for a moment they are marginal.) And on the wasteland of the covered - over forums (reminiscent of the wasteland on which he was assasinated by the Fascists) Pasolini joins us with Rabbia, and his enduring example of how to carry the chorus in our heads."

by John Berger

"potoVanje"

Obraz prekrile so skrlatne niti.
Potopila se je v vode, kjer prebivajo vsi tisti v njej, ki sami, od nikogar ljubljeni, bedijo, noc in dan, brez dna, brez rok.
Na tleh lezi telo in ona gleda vanj.
Tezki vzdihi padajo po kozi, na mestu kjer lezi, se vdirajo sokovi,
pronicajo v tla kot kazipoti, nenehno odmikajocega se mesa.
S prstom zarije v meso.
Blescece siva zmrazi jo pot, ko zatava proti trebuhu.
Od tam kjer vse bezi iz nje, do tja kamor se vraca.
Noter globoko se ozre naokoli.
Povsod delcki, ostanki rok, pogledov, zlogov od besed, razpadlih nasmehov, gnijocih sledi vsega kar je steklo skozi in se ujelo v spomin.
Vsega kar umira v telesu z njo.
Dotika se in drobci se drobijo. Razsuseni, potrgani, pomeckani, stisnjeni med kosti.
Od dalec, skozi nema usta zatuli. Obudi jih le za hip.
Skozi popek leze ven in leze, se vedno se vraca, v ustih okus zamolklega premika.

written by anjajune
photo by david wojnarowicz

..pozelenje

"Ljudje ti ne privoscijo kaj dosti uzitkov; pravijo, da zate to ni dobro. Da bos potem hotel vedno vec. Kako nestanovitno je pozelenje. Hudic nikoli ne spi in nikoli ne miruje! Pozelenje je nagajivo in se ne meni za nase ideale, zato se pa tako zaganjamo za njimi. Norcuje se iz nasih naporov, kar nas samo se podziga. Pozelenje je nas skriti anarhist in tajni agent - podimo se za njim in ga zaklepamo v najbolj varovane kletke. In ko ravno mislimo, da smo ga spravili na hladno, nas premaga ali pa vsaj napolni z novim upanjem. Pozelenje me vedno spravlja v smeh, ker se iz vseh nas dela norca. Ampak se vedno raje norec kot fasist."

odlomek iz: Intimnost, Hanif Kureishi
photo by Ornela Vorpsi

Francesca Woodman photos

http://www.heenan.net/woodman/

On Francesca Woodman..by Sally Davies

Francesca Woodman's photographs have consistently garnered critical attention since her premature death in the early eighties and this exhibition at Victoria Miro comes in the wake of the publication of a major monograph and a solo display at Tate Modern. The American artist's work is rarely written about without some mention of the dramatic biography behind it: Woodman began taking photographs as a young teenager, producing around 800 before her suicide aged 22 in 1981. This apparent precocity and intensity of production, coupled with the fact that Woodman frequently made herself the subject of her pictures, often colours interpretation of her work. However, it is important not to see her body of work and her life story as some kind of neat totality, each fully illustrating the other.

In the Phaidon monograph on Woodman, Chris Townsend says that she "never saw herself as a fully realized artist, even if that is how we see her now"¹ and many of her photographs were experiments, attempts, forays into technique and composition. The images produced are nonetheless incredibly effective, whilst the recurrence of certain actions and motifs demonstrates the rigour she applied to her practice, together with a range of influences from classical sculpture to surrealism as well as Aaron Siskind's abstract surfaces. Woodman's subject matter was primarily the body and space and she often used the frame of the photograph as a space in which bodies could pose, move and perform alongside carefully selected props. The artist's approach to photography inverted its usual documentary application; instead she used the camera as a way of creating temporary scenes and spaces and bringing about the transformation of objects, surfaces and movement. As Townsend says: "with Woodman's art the medium that is most concerned with showing us what is indisputably there becomes preoccupied with hesitation, with uncertainty, with displacement of forms".²

References
1. Townsend C. Francesca Woodman. London: Phaidon, 2006: 6.
2. Townsend C. Francesca Woodman. London: Phaidon, 2006: 7.

written by Sally Davies

On Francesca Woodman..by Gianni Romano (Milano Oct.1998)

Woodman was photographer and model, subject and object, at the same time. She utilized the female body to develop her own self-knowledge and not some representative but generic model of the world. The images of the body that this young American was experimenting with suggest a diffuse intimacy while tending to dissuade a voyeuristic approach. Unlike most of the images we are faced with on a daily basis, where the body is treated like a commodity to be used and consumed, or an icon to adore at safe distance, Francesca Woodman employs her body to initiate a dialog with herself. She places her body in familiar settings, though at the limits of our experience, presenting it as a symbol of receptivity, a meeting place between herself and the rest of the world, a communicative model in which information about her experience is presented and reflected upon. She uses her own body as a model to investigate her own vision and not another's vision of her body. Woodman projects images and symbols, hopes and fears onto the female body. She uses it like a gesticulative vector not fully known to her, communicating to the viewer the novelty of her encounter.

On the one hand, this attitude was motivated by the artist' s own youth, since these pictures were taken when Woodman was in her late teens and early twenties, in the years before she committed suicide. Art critic Kathryn Hixon wrote in her essay "Essential Magic" (Zurich, 1992): "Woodman's pictures are not de-constructive, but constructive. She added layers of reflection and mimicry within the photograph to confound the transparent recording of the real. The images become psychological portraits of the identity of the body, rather than identifying physical portraits that reveal the psyche." To mention the psychological component is very important in the analysis of Woodman's oeuvre. The symbolic reconstruction of reality, without doubt, can be considered as a mechanism in the recognition/awareness of reality itself. It's as though the artist were researching into the formation of her own personality by exhibiting— sometimes even in the photographs themselves — her impulses, reflections, vulnerability, her awareness of the moment, and the horror of sudden absence. Many of her pictures seem to go in this direction, from the early images taken in Providence, to the "Angel"; series and the portrait multiples, in which three women were portrayed with a picture of Woodman's face covering their own (an homage to Meatyard?). These are psychological portraits: not the visual records of daily existence but episodes in which the expressive capability of the artist's imagination is intertwined with the richness and intimacy of her own life. Yes, we know, it takes a great effort to become an angel, and yet her pictures are still fluttering somewhere around our minds.

written by Gianni Romano

Somatic identity: a photographic search, written by Nelli Bekus

photo by Francesca Woodman

"The realization of oneself as the body is a fundamental difference of the man from animals".
Jaques Lacan

If we assume that human somatic constitution can have a project of its own, gesture will be this project. Relationships between the body and gestures are more significant than a simple analogy to language. The essence of gesture is in the creation of a physical presence, which is much more material than, say, voice. This presence is a project implemented by gesture in relation to human the body.

Gesture implements an external project of the body and, therefore, carries its internal meaning. Gesture is what the body does to itself, transmitting something that escapes the consciousness and language and is not articulated in any other way. The autonomy of gesture and -- inside of it -- life of the body creates a new formula understanding, which is different from verbal understanding, from figurative logic and from integrity of human existence.

All gestures are autobiographical. They "live" a biography of the body, adding more meaning to it and reflecting it in external gestures. In this respect, each gesture is the body's surpassing of its own boundaries that results in its expansion to the external world. Presenting the body to the outside world, gesture writes a geography of the body, which is a biography thrown to space and freed from time boundaries. Inside gesture, human existence is transformed. What used to be internal becomes external and somatism transforms into events.

A simple external articulation, which is a way of communicating with the outside world, cannot serve as a reason for the existence of gesture, since the body cannot be an author of this communication. The author is a subject, while the body is not subjective and its identity cannot be defined within the scope of traditional relations between subject and object. The body slips past this explanation because it is a condition of existence of both and constantly switches from one side to another.

Gesture not only returns the body its needs demonstrating its own dependence on the satisfying of the needs. Gesture is the transformation of a single monad called "soma" into many variants of presence which create the contours of imaginable reality where gestures multiply methods, types and forms of somatic existence, Unlike the body, gesture is always put in some context defined by external forms, outlines, surfaces, among which gestures take place.

Various forms of visual art as ways of not only intellectual but also mental and somatic human expression may be considered among other gestures. As Merleau-Ponty put it, an artist transforms the world into painting in return for yielding to it his body. As a somatic project, art founds itself in the cultural context of forms and surfaces. However, while a gesture is supposed to hold a certain border of somatic perceptivity in art this border lies across the territory of imaginary images rather than those actually in existence. Art is basically a somatic project by culture.

In the European tradition, culture understands the body as an independent phenomenon, as part of anthropological problems involved in culture and an allegory of desire. All views on this issue lie within the system of understanding art in the context of cultural human existence. This may explain why all bodily images and related somatic projects in photography and other arts operate in accordance with the laws of cultural reality. Remaining within the general scheme of development images of the body in contemporary art normally represent reflective and associative logic of its perception by culture.

written by Nelli Bekus