LINDA FREGNI NAGLER

LINDA FREGNI NAGLER

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In my artistic research, I explore the nature of the photographic medium and how the antropological and historical context in which it is shown influences its perception. I interrogate myself about authorship, repro duction, manipulation and fake, using photography with a critical, reflective purpose, investigating tradition, iconographic conventions, the status of the photographic image. My work is strictly connected with the ac tivity of collecting: found photographs become the raw material to question how images act as living things with their own trajectories, desires, internal logics, and how they often evidence an undefinable familiarity with their subjects.Pointing up anonymous photographs that are conventionally excluded from art context, I seek for elements of social or aesthetic coherence; the ability of these pictures to shed light, more than “authorial” photos, on the visual conventions to which a given era subjects the representation of reality. Time and cultural changes contribute to make these conventions seem bizarre, grotesque or poetic.The processes I enact with images are different: I may conceptually appropriate them, presenting them as readymades; or rephotograph them, making a temporal and aesthetic shift with respect to the original; or I may re-create them, through a laborious mise-en-sc ne. This practices enable me to intervene on the time frame of the image, and create a contemporary version of the original, somehow an ‘impossible’ photogra ph.

The reception of photographs acts as a place of work, a structured and structuring space whithin which the reader deploys, and is deployed, by whatever codes he or she is familiar with in order to make sense.(Victor Burgin, Thinking Photography, London, 1982)

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ShAShIN No ShAShIN (in Japanese, “photography of photography”)

The sequence is composed by 18 black and white prints that revisit the typical subjects of Japanese photography in the Meiji period (1868-1912), especially those of the so-called Yokohama Shashin (Yokohama photography). Scenes of traditional Japanese everyday life, or images from oriental myths and legends, staged in the studio in a very stylized, artificial manner. More than a century later, some of the subjects of Yokohama Shashin have been restaged and photographed: Wind Costume, Whispering in Parlor, The Street Singer, Life on the Ocean’s Wave… The painted backdrops and sets have been re-created, garments and hairstyles have been reproduced, and the tableaux vivants have been framed at the same angles as the original shots. At times the reproduction of the original subject is literal, down to the smallest details; at times a margin of invention and variation was left. In doing so, I purposefully conform to the mentality of the Yokohama photographers themselves, for whom the originality of the subject taken from an established repertoire was not as important as the skill and efficacy of its staging.The photographs of the Yokohama school effectively sum up some of the characteristics I seek in the period photographs I choose as starting points: the deliberate use of artifice, which brings out the inherently artificial nature of photography itself; the expression of crea tivity not at the macroscopic level of the subject and the style, but in the details, at the margins of the image; finally, the complex game of perpetuating, adapting and reinterpreting iconographic stereotypes. The subjects of the Yokohama school were based on Ukiyo-e prints; yet the school had been founded by westerners (Felice Beato, Adolfo Farsari, Raimund von Stillfried and others), and was aimed at a market of European collectors. The images produced in the Yokohama circle, anachronistic with respect to the realities of modern Japan, conformed to a certain exotic occidental imaginary; in turn, they soon became a popular source of imagery in the West. Adding another level, another passage in this lengthy process of stratification, I attempt to make its complexity more evident. At the same time, I point to the cultural and temporal distance that separates us from an extinct tradition, and to the effects of aesthetic disorientation this distance can trigger.

Yuzuru (The Twilight Crane), 2011, gelatin silver print - selenium toner, cm 28,3 x 21,3.

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Playing at Ball, 2009, gelatin silver print - selenium toner, cm 60 x 50.

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Snow and Rain, 2007-2011, gelatin silver prints - selenium toner, cm 21,5 x 17,5 each.

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Original Meiji Period Albument Prints (Archive of the Artist).

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Self Portrait as Yokohama Photographer, 2011, Ink-jet print on cotton paper, cm 14,2 x 18,5, cm 56,5 x 60,5 x 5 framed.

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This work is a translation of the magic lantern device into a perfor-mance that aimes to give a new life to a repertoire of universes which no longer exist. All the photographic material shown in the projection, as well as the two projectors, is original; it was collected over the years, and joined into personal and arbitrary cathegories.The performance consists in a double projection of old magic lantern glass slides. Things that Death cannot Destroy is the title of a series of different se-quences of images (part 1, part 2...), conceived as a continuous stream of visual associations. The sequence changes everytime the perfor-mance takes place. While two projectionists, placed at the sides of the devices, altern the images letting them slide into the projectors, a female voice reads of the original captions in the language they were written (mainly English). The photographs, shot between 1860 and 1920, have different geo-graphical origins and have been conceived for different purposes: di-dactic, familiar, documentary… Some of them report exhau stive cap-tions, with date, place and copyright, and sometimes they even carry personal writings of the photographer, the printer or the owner of the slide, whereas others lack completely of information. Thus, through the union between image and text and the stream of un-canny pairing of photographic subjects, the different moments of the projection suggest various interpretative keys: a lecture of anthropol-ogy, a historical documentary report, a surreal, fictitious and sometimes even comical tale. Every photograph, though belonging to very differ-ent contexts, is fed by the former one, the visual path developping into a sort of cadavre exquis. The images’ choreography raises issues about staging the human fig-ure, social categorization, censor ship and copyright. This pre-cine-matographic material is reinvented by intervening on the presentation technique of the images. In this personal and ambiguous archive, what is legible is not History, but a subsequent glance on many pieces of a mosaic that may be com-bined with infinite variations.

ThINGS ThAT DEATh cANNoT DESTRoy

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Things that Death Cannot Destroy, Part 1, 2010, Teatro Franco Parenti, Milano.

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| ANIM-015-ML |NV KR Man and Red Kangaroo (Macropus rufus) BoxingThe University of the State of New York, Visual Instruction DivisionNegative N#. A 317, New York State Education Department.

| ARCH-011-ML |Pavillion Salt Lake CityChicago Transparency Co.143 N. Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill.

| ASTR-011-ML |R.A.S. 442. 40-in Refractor. Yerkes Obs.

| ETN-053-ML |Libian woman with sewing machine.

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In occasion of the show “Le Silence – Une Fiction”, at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, together with the performance, I was invited to createa device which enables a durable viewing of some glass slides that are nor-mally projected in the performance. Inspired by a nineteenth’ century Camera Obscura, these viewers con-tain two back-lit glass images each. The observer is invited to lean on the viewers and have a private vision of the old photographs.

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“In this work, the artist’s image mingle with those of the past, in a tem-poral short circuit that surprises the gaze and reveals unusual icono-graphic analysis of historical nature. “A Life on the Ocean’s Wave” is an iconographic atlas that con tains one image shot by the artist (de-scribed by her as a false among original images), together with old albu-men prints, tintypes and photographic reproductions from the United States and Japan, datable from the second half of the 1800s to the 1920s, where the central feature of the photographic setting is always the same kind of fake boat. The anonymous men and women of dif-ferent times and different countries, united by the fact that they once posed and were photo graphed at the center of the same painted back-drop, become a tool of historical reflection, for us, on the iconographic recurrence of a single subject through very different cultural and so-cial geographies. At the same time, they reactivate questions about the meaning of photography itself.”

A LIFE oN ThE ocEAN’S wAvE

Francesca Di Nardo in Beyond the Dust-Artists’ Documents Today,exhibition catalogue, p.9.

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Original tintypes and albumen prints (Archive of the Artist).

The source for the subjects of these pictures came from the so called “Grieving Widow” photographs appeared in USA ca. in 1870-90s. At the origins of photography, mortuary pictures were very common. To-day the image of death is considered repulsive and mortuary photogra-phy seems to have died out. In those images of “Unidentified Mourn-ers”, the viewer’s normal desire to have a recognisable likeness of the subjects is frustrated. Yet, there is no evidence that these images were commercially used. Whatever the original purpose of thesepictures was, it is now lost to us.Printed in a small format on a white background, the pictures of two weeping women become dark, symmetrical blots that are deliberately reminiscent of Rorschach tests. The onlooker is thus invited to deci-pher what he sees.

UNIDENTIFIED MoURNERS

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Unidentified Mourners, 2008,12 Gelatin silver prints, cm 24 x 30 each.

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IMMEMoRE

The origin of this group of works, created for a solo show in Milan, 2008, comes from other photographs, either found or purchased over the years. Original images by unknown authors date back to the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. Working on this material, I have created a series of new prints, which are often formally very far from the original.The largest group of works (White Sound, Fleurette Africaine, Without Title [Family], Anytime in the second half of the XX Century, The Truce [Young Man on a Boat], Old and New Friends at the Zoo), is the result of an activity that lies somewhere between restoration and a circumstantial investigation. Patient work in the dark room has changed the images so that they depart from their subject definitively. Paradoxically, the fact that the prints lose the opaque patina of time makes them even more impen-etrable. The title of the exhibition, Immemore, hints at the impossibility of returning to the original meaning – emotional and existential – of the pho-tographs, and to the sense of loss that derives from this. That which they“document” (if the word has any meaning in this context) is merely the continuity over time of the need to portray oneself, to mirror oneself in a photographic image.In all of these works, the purpose is to make the spectator aware of a basic fact, but one which we tend to forget in the age of digital technology: a photograph is not simply an image, but is the union of an image and a medium, and so it is an object. Each time that a photograph is rephoto-graphed and changes medium, a translation or a betrayal takes place.My objective is to create photographic reproductions which, if reproduced in turn, lose all meaning.

White Sound, 2008, gelatin silver print, cm 36 x 44.

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Anytime in the second half of the XX Century, 2008, Gelatin silver prints, cm 15 x 20 each.

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Old and New Friends at the Zoo, 2008, gelatin silver prints, cm 40 x 40 each.

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It is common habit to observe photographs reproduced in books, maga-zines, posters, etc. Viewers generally care of the images’ subject and rarely of the photographs as objects in themselves, believing that a replica is just as the original. This is why in several works, including Caribe (2005), Lim-bo/Convertible (2006), Friends (2008), I focused on the ‘surface’ of the pictures, intervening with slight scratches, signs and other artifices that can easily be perceived as part of the photographed scene, but can be distin-guished just at the sight of the original photograph. To underline that also photography, like painting and sculpture, has to be seen from real.

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Caribe, 2006, poster, cm 180 x 300.

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Untitled (Family), 2008, dia projection on solarized print, cm 100 x 70. Friends, 2008, gelatin silver print and ink, cm 48 x 38. Limbo/Convertible, 2008, gelatin silver print, cm 30 x 30.

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NoThING bUT A Show

The show was realized in 2009 to celebrate the restauration and the museo-graphical set-up in 1958, after its bombing and its almost complete distruc-tion during WW2 of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan by the group of rationalist architects BBPR (Banfi, Belgioioso, Peressutti, Rogers). Though very dis-cussed and continuously menaced of dismantlement, this set-up of the Mu-seum of Ancient Arts is a symbol of elegance, sobriety and dialogue between History of Art and Architecture in Milan. A group of contemporary artists were invited to design site specific works in order to create a “course within a course”, generating connections and alliances, contrasts and short-circuits with BBPR’s work.

LE MUSéE IMMAGINAIRE

The title is inpired by André Malraux’ homonymous literary work, a re-flection on the establishment and the functions of Mu seums in Europe. Inside the eleven caskets arranged along the walls of one room at the first floor of the museum, designed by BBPR to house part of the Fine Arts Collection, I replaced the background, that was originally arranged for the show of the objects, with big photographic prints. These are peculiar images drawn from a series of “Magic Lantern Slides” shot in the first part of the XX Century, in New York City’s Natural His-tory Museum. Their subject is the staging of some Diorama (set up in scale which recreates natural scenes and environments of various kinds). My intervention is developped as a sort of chinese box: inserting the objects of the collection in a dysfunctional context, it triggers a reflection on a more general de-contextualization operated by the museum intended as a historical product, as a place of conservation in which Art is extrapolate from its originary social environment. Doing this, it also casts light on the creative processes which regulate the set-up projects, establishing a short-circuit with the displays by BBPR.

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Installation views of the display cabinets and glass slides (Archive of the Artist).

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RUNNING A LAp ARoUND ThE TRAck

The distance of 400 meters corresponds in athletics to the complete lap of the running track.In slang, people dealing with athletics refer to this competition, being a contest both of speed and endurance, with the ex pression “the death lap”. The film narrates the venture of a man aged 50 who has never practiced sports at professional level, and decides to under go vigorous training in order to establish a speed record for the 400 meter distance for his age. The protagonist is an artist, Cesare Pietroiusti, who is challenging himself to the limits of his physical and mental possibilities. Linda Fregni Nagler and Cesare Pietroiusti work very differently, Pietroi-usti emphasizes the analysis of experience, and Fregni Nagler focuses on the ambiguity of visual perception and photographic vision.They aim to find a difficult common ground between their positions. They tried to realise a work that transcends the genre of performance art and where lived experience merges with the formal/aesthetic qualities of the filmed image.

Video, 2010, 15’

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EyEbRowS

This video is composed by materials that source from disparate contexts. The voice over is drawn from one of the hundreds of “hypnosis sessions” given on youtube by self-styled hypnotherapists. The images are in part the appropriation of found footage of domestic videos of snow blizzards, alternating with others shot during a workshop with a class of nine years-old children, with whom the artist has undertaken a journey through some of the themes of photography that are particularly dear to her. Working on the crossing from photographer to subject being photographed, the children played a very simple choreography, and shot the images interchanging their presence at the camera. Once edited, this heterogeneous material merges together evoking a silent and softened memory of childhood.

Video, 2010, 5’

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cURRIcULUM vITAE

Linda Fregni Nagler, born in Stockholm, 21.10.1976. Lives and works in Milan, Italy.

2006 Diploma in Cinematographic Photography at Escuela International de Cine y Television (EICTV), San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba

2004 Diploma in Visual Arts at Fondazione Ratti, Como, with Jimmie Durham

2003-2007 Participation to “Progetto Casina”, artistic project inside the feminine section of the Prison San Vittore, Milan

2000 BFA in painting at the Academy of fine Arts of Brera, Milan.

SoLo ShowS

2011 Shashin no Shashin, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milano

2009 Un Giro di Campo, with Cesare Pietroiusti, Franco Soffiantino Gallery, Turin

2008 Immemore, Galleria Alessandro De March, Milan

2007 NY Playgrounds, Columbia University, NY

2006 Taken Over, Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, Rome

2003 Bambini, curated by Gabi Scardi, ViaFarini, Milan

GRoUp ShowS

2012 LE SILENCE –Une fiction, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco - Villa Paloma, curated by Simone Menegoi

2011 To see an Object, To see the Light, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Guarene d’Alba, curated by Ginny Kollak, Padraic E. Moore, Pavel S. Pys̀

2010 Beyond the Dust, Artists’ Documents Today, De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, Middelburg; La Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan; Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris, curated by Francesca di Nardo

2010 SI - Sindrome Italiana, la jeune création artistique italienne, MAGASIN-Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble

2010 Person in Less, Palazzo Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene D’Alba, and Palazzo Ducale, Genova; curated by Erica Cooke, Chris Fitzpatick, Angelique Campens

2009 La Différence, CAB-Centre d’Art Bastille, curated by Vincent Verlé

2009 The Sky in a Room: An Eccentric View of the Landscape, GC. AC Monfalcone, curated by Andrea Bruciati

2009 Nothing But a Show, Museum of Ancient Art, Castello Sforzesco in Milan, curated by Alessio Ascari

2007 Just in Time, Riccardo Crespi Gallery, Milan, curated by Gabi Scardi

2006 Arcipelago, 14th International Festival of Short Film and New Images, Rome

2006 Metaphysics of Youth, curated by Luigi Fassi and Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, Pescara

2005 Uscita Pistoia, Spazio A Contemporanearte, Pistoia

2005 Racconto di un luogo, Museo della Triennale, Milan

2004 Surely we will be Confused, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, with Jimmie Durham, Como

2003 In Movimento, ViaFarini, Milano, curated by Gabi Scardi

pRIzES AND RESIDENcIES

2008 Centre International d’Accueil et d’Echanges des Récollets, Scholarship offered by Dena Foundation

2007 New York Price, offered by Italian Foreign Office and Columbia University

lindafregni@gmail.com