Alessio Zemoz's Projects

EL GERMESAS TAINDÔVAL Le Messager Valdôtain 1989 The Family Tarots and the Aosta Valley Repubblic. “Freedom at any price” A. Celestine D. and a life without pictures. Short story of a weak genealogy. A. Celestine D. is a visual memory orphan: she didn’t inherit any family pictures. She inherited an identity of young european woman, mountaineer by tradition and free spirit by vocation. where > Valsavarenche, Aosta. Grand Paradiso National Parc the research > family pictures finded in Valsavarenche and around the process > from Family Pictures to Family Tarots Play cards following the tradition long life to the intramontismo 1989 > at page 220 of the “Messager Valdôtain” we read the news of the controversy end against the Grand Paradiso National Parc. End of the electoral muteness. 1989 > the Berlin wall falls down. 1989 > A. Celestine D. parents divorced > a few months later she stopped to talk for an hole year. Her alcoholic father will soon die by cancer. 1985 > the community fights against the country laws. For three years Valsavarenche citizens deny themselves the right to vote. 1985 > dynamiter attack against a high tension pylon right next to the chief town. 1985 > A. Celestine D. is born. 1980 > manifestation screaming “Freedom at any price”, ready for any kind of fight. Inhibited the local council power in favor of Parc and Region, by aggravating the yet serious mountain problems, clear in terms of economical development delay and demographic decline. “If they move down the borders bullets will whistle” “Borders are untouchables otherwise pylons will explode” 1975 > larger conflict period “The fascist law focuses on animals the democrartic law must focus on humans” “In Turin and Rome didn’t they know that the Parc is our property?” 1948 > Aosta Valley gets her self-governement 1945 > Italy is free 1944 > Eight month before the liberation regular elections were promoted by F. Chabod coherently with national laws in force before fascist dictatorship. That day citizens elected Valentino D as mayor. 1926 > J. M. Trèves found winth E. Chanoux the “Jeune Vallée d’Aoste”. Democracy and self-governement. Here’s the origin of the firsts partisans in Aosta Valley. 1906 > Birth of E. Chanoux 1901 > Birth of F. Chabod, from Valsavarenche 1700 > Uncertain date Joseph A. D. arrives in Valsavarenche. Wanted, he gets there from Spain. Genealogy traces of Joseph A. D were lost. Roots. All of these missions, carried out in beautiful and holy harmony for the common good, represented one day the Fatherland of the Fatherlands, humanity. And only then will the foreign word pass men’s speeches; and the man will be able to greet the man, from anywhere he will move towards him, with the sweet name of brother. F. Chabod

Unsignificant photographs that say nothing and that do not even talk about anything else, that is to say: it’s all a spinning wheel. from the project COMBAT TRILOGY SHAKIRA • TEQUILA • OBAMA Unsignificant photographs that say nothing and that do not even talk about anything else, that is to say: it’s all a spinning wheel. “Claude Bernard was right, the soil is everything, the microbe is nothing” L. Pasteur Strange things happen in this universe, and people need to know such strange things. They need to be told them with grace and sincerity. About the strange things that happen in this universe (and that it is good for people to know), I say this: go away, there is nothing to see! There is nothing to understand! There is nothing to laugh about! For the rest, SHAKIRA is ugly anti-new-photography (which is not even photography anymore) that says nothing and that does not even talk about anything else: a dirty series of archaeological images thrown there, traces of a world that never existed and for that reason, in the future, will never be. For the rest: we discovered that into another reality we live under rules that we don’t like and we discovered that the world is bad. Nothing is true! You have to look carefully (everyone will see what they need), because the (passive) observation must exactly represent nature: nothing is true! reality does not exist! These fake photographs don’t exist! And there is no going back: images are not a place where photography commands and where, dying, it can show herself. However, one should not even be afraid: we are the creators of this universe. But what is there beyond what appears to us as it appears to us? Truth: no. Reason: no. Wrong: probably. Consciousness: with a little luck. Freedom: doubts about it. Haiku to clarify the concept: Look at the photograph, the photograph, the photograph! The photographer said: it's all a spinning wheel. side note SHAKIRA (name of one of the hundreds of cows that are brought to combat), together with the works TEQUILA (name of one of the hundreds of goats that are brought to combat) and OBAMA (name of one of the hundreds of steers that are brought to combat ), is the last of three works that make up the wider COMBAT TRILOGY: an artistic research project that explores the theme of the battle between animals as an identity, traditional and constitutive event of the material and immaterial cultural heritage of contemporary man who inhabits the territories of the Aosta Valley.

We live only once, it is said, and while we live we born and we die who knows how many times: what if Humans could die and born again, for the last time. A question of energies, of transformation, of form and content in perpetual movement, prolific of new connections and suggestions. A question of geographic and temporal disorientation, of a narrative short circuit. A question of life and death: nothing is as it seems. As in a game of unfinished references, the viewer is led in an itinerary without precise mapping, neither spatial nor temporal, and is free to govern, or not, his own suggestions with new awareness: in a dimension of reality in which everything happens for the first time, photography is often a palliative experience, an apparent and temporary remedy. In fact, to understand the work it is necessary to suspend one's own forms of pre-judgment and abandon oneself to that slight sense of indeterminacy: among those who are represented who works in which department? where are we exactly? Or rather: when are we exactly there? As early as 1945 André Bazin sensed that at the base of the figurative arts there would be the idea of defending oneself against time, corrupting things and bodies, and in parallel the dream of overcoming death: "to artificially fix the carnal appearances of the being means to be take it away from the flow of duration: to bring it back to life". The result is a reproductive obsession that comes before any aesthetic need: before the expression of an artist comes "the psychological desire to replace the external world with its double [...], the instinct to save the being through the appearances”. Roland Barthes, about forty years later, adds: "In photography, therefore, reality and past coexist. In this sense photography - very real and in itself mortal - makes you live what has been and is no longer, immortalizing it. It has in itself, therefore, a strabic, insane condition, which is the natural, hallucinatory, iconic condition of photography: what has been is not here; it is here that which is no longer ". Born about three years ago, AOSTABELLOSGUARDO is, in fact, a project about an artistic research that questions, to overcome it, the dualism life / death on the merit of the public hospital Beauregard of Aosta which hosts, at a distance of one floor from the other, two special departments, namely the Hospice, Residential Structure of Palliative Care, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, Complex Structure of Obstetrics and Gynecology: at a distance of a few meters a cycle opens and closes, whatever this may ever means. The experience of life is in itself confusing and generates unexpected forms of meaning: it is still the man who sooner or later defines. And in this sense AOSTABELLOSGUARDO helps us to define once more the perimeter of our thinking towards themes such as palliative care, pain therapy, up to those always actuals such life end and therapeutic self-determination, but also those of pregnancy, abortion, birth, assisted procreation, till the themes related to language and memory. The research dedicated to the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology takes the name of HYSTEROS, in the greek uterus, and together with the PALLIUM project, from the latin mantle, goes to compose the work. The two suggestions, uterus and mantle, are even confused to reverse the generated perception: the patient's care does not always correspond to his recovery, just as joy and pain do not always have a linear dynamic. As a result, three types of images were chosen: self-portraits of the operators, photographs of the environment and images from the author's family archive dating back to the eighties that is to say the period when the hospital was inaugurated, between 1984 and 1985. The design approach has deliberately worked towards the construction of a work that would analyze two specific departments of the Beauregard Hospital, place them in close relationship with each other and place them in close relationship with the author: we are institutions, all of us. The strength of the proposed planning lies in the direct comparison between the two contexts thanks to the aesthetic solutions and, in a political sense, aims to highlight the dimension of two specific departments of a public health service structure in constant evolution and always to be valued and protected in a logic of collective responsibility: to look is to change.

“TEQUILA 177” are name and number of one of the hundreds goats that every year are taken to combat in the field of a series of moving events which take place in spring, summer and autumn in the alpine region of Aosta Valley (Italy). These events are called “Batailles des chèvres”: goats combats. The animal that fight wins after defeating the highest number of rivals. The animal that fight keep being unhurt. Someone judges these events as bloodless. The animal that fight is always a female one. During last two years the author went to these events investigating this context in relationship with local traditional and cultural identity which is himself part of. The focus of this project is the human being: men, women and young, with the stories that they carry on the surface (cultural elements, social origin, age) and with the instincts that are laying under the veil of their image (happiness, natural awareness, ambition, fame). The tale develops a particular aesthetics with the purpose to emerge the resonances between human beings, objects, landscapes and pictures in order to suggest the emotional and unconscious dimension. “TEQUILA 177” experiments a simple but not simplified language, careful toward the in field as to the the out of field, toward the very small as to the very big: the relationship between the elements is always generating new forms of sense. The effort was to change the point of view from the inside of the project: everything is one and vice versa, in synchronicity. In terms of language solutions, TEQUILA 177 develops many different ideas about photography and its meaning concerning identity comprehension. This project deals with the emersion of cultural identity elements through the tale of what is called a series of local events focusing on a precise activity: goats fights. The most evident aspect of this project is that there are no images of goats fights. The author put the accent on the focus of this visual exploration: what can we find right there before, during and after the fight are all elements that can reveal cultural identity. There is some kind of “animal instinct” out there, beyond the fights, and part of the author is in synchronicity with. Not to show the fights doesn't mean avoid to watch them and by consequence to deal with: it means to better understand the deep focus of the research and to suspend the judgment on animal treatment. It's evident that goats fights are events made by human beings not for goats but for human beings themselves and that's where the attention of the author goes to. Actually portraits are made before the battles and represent people that brought at least one goat into the ring. The same way landscapes were shot before the fights. During the fights were shot details and backwards portraits of the public: the pictures of the public were printed then framed and finally photographed once more on walls by a choice made by the author following aesthetic or personal reasons. Actually these kind of events are organized by the Association Comité Régional Bataille des Chèvres which receive a public economical contribution through the Agricultural Department as an integration in order to realize the championship: one of the expressed ambition is to improve the events also in the field of the complex touristic and gastronomic way. So who are these fights made for? Tourists: who and where are they? Farmers: who and where are they? Which future does it suggests? Finally this project is composed by pre existing pictures: the research ends after the fights, in other places, with the photographs of the winners of every event made by the organizers themselves that were taken by the internet, from the combats official website, and reframed by the author. All the elements are here mounted in a body of work with a circular structure in order to represent the metaphorical approach: for the author photography can't be conceived out of the concept of dynamic experience, from the subject to the author, from the inside of the frame to the outside, from the very personal world to the public space, back and forth moving in circle.

The project called “lo vàco” is the result of an explorative research focused on the social perception of local contest of abandoned landscapes in the mountain country of Aosta Valley. The author worked in relationship with a structured anthropologist (Valentina Mnella) in order to discover how people feel and live the environment around themselves. Through interviews, questionnaires, family albums sharing and debates with high school students, the result is high presence of “vaco”: of empty. In the local dialect called “patois”, “lo vaco” (from latin “vacuus”) is the word used to call empty territories, even those that once were destined to agriculture or farm animals. The empty is the perception. Everything is empty they say. Everything changed: landscapes and territories turned into an apparently non recognizable reality which imposes the feeling of the empty. As a photographer I ask: is it possible to take a picture of the empty?

Diary of an ordinary life In order to seize life, one must penetrate the in-between, the exact point where something ceases to be and something else is about to come to life. In this way art can be thought of as “couch grass”, as something always growing in the middle; it never settles on what is fixed, constant, motionless, but moves forward through exorbitant lines of flight that cannot be stopped. The in between is photography, the in between is life. Where to find life? In the middle, in the crossing. Start Wearing Life tells us about a similar try: to get over the limit of the photogram, to overcome the fixity of an isolated moment. The road becomes three-dimensional, the white lines thicken, the motion is there, palpable, in perpetual escape. And again, the bed is a set of folds in shaky positions: a break that seems already over. Truth or fiction? The artist never writes about his neurosis; autobiographism is always an excuse. Real experience and personal feelings only play a minor role in the artistic experience. In other terms, art is a superior form of fiction that places truth on a much more disturbing level, never on a basic one. Looking at these photos, one can understand that they hide, under a cloak of diarism, of memory – the father? love? The “by your side when” – an almost indefinable element of raw objectivity, of disturbing clarity. It is the effect of a radical decontextualization: life’s moments lose their warmth in the decomposition, in the fragmentation of a click, of a “capture”. A warm, clear and subjective memory, with a gentle temporality, becomes, for the external observer, an hallucinated vision, a cold, distancing and marmoreal journey. Faces of statues, showers with flowers, fields and refineries: an itinerary that becomes vaguely Lynchian. Narration is not missing, but it is no more the narration of life, of chronological events; it is a higher, arbitrary narration – the round recalls the round – that looks out onto the fate, while not indulging in it, always hanging in the balance between two worlds, two polarities. Start Wearing Life doesn’t want to resign, but always remains in the middle, a pure elegy of a further life – the art? The origin? The perversion? – which never leaves this earth, the earth of memories, of affections, of familiar warmth. Which life? Which lives? Giulio Piatti

Venuto al modo / Came to a way ongoing project The literal translation of “Venuto al modo” is “Came to a way”. In Italian it is a sort of poetical licensed wordplay which is half way between “just born” and “born this way”. Venuto al modo represents the start of an artistic and spiritual research project. This research has a far-reaching origins over time and has roots related to a period of almost ten years. Now the project has found the right technical, narrative and linguistic context in which to begin its journey of life in freedom again. The works are carried out following the digitalization of "Washi" film: medium-sized monochromatic orthochromatic negatives realized through the sensitization of Kozo 28gr / sqm Japanese paper strips. The strips are developed by the author on-site: the project is realized into the heart of the Alps, into the valley of Rhêmes Notre-Dame (Aosta – Italy). The concepts to which this project is linked are among others: truth, speculation, vulnerability, memory, failure and mountain. Truth - There is no truth, there is no way. From the point of view of the construction of language, each work is conceived as a text developed in accordance with the formula of Japanese vertical classical writing: each strip of film is a vertical text line and embedded images are the only intelligible form of organized writing, such as a hypothetical and arbitrary sequence of kanji and kana. The eye therefore undergoes a forced inversion of the path: vertically, from top to bottom, from the top to the truth. However, it is not possible to define with certainty the boundaries of the true dimension: objects become confused, places vanish, meaning is blurred and vibrant, abstract and free from absolute and direct meaning. In this sense, the concept of truth and way is also questioned by the process of digitization: from the actual impression on analog film to the manipulation of digital intervention. The purpose: to create arbitrarily structured text in a poetic sense form. By coming to the way everything is, or was, real (the experience, the process, the things and the places) yet nothing is, or was, true (the experience, the process, the things and the places). Speculation - an inadequate project: anyone who sees understands everything. Into Venuto al modo the eye does not have to "add" anything to understand the meaning. To understand the meaning, or to understand everything, the eye must look through a fracture. Came to the way is a sort of uncertain form of circumstance interruption where the act of traditional vision is interrupted by the vertical dimension that opens to the practice of emotional risk related to the dilation of the dark. Like these lines of text, the strips also undergo somehow a dynamic of coercive speculation: the language tools, here the picture (the frame, the reiteration as a textual element, the reiteration as a film element, the panning, the blurred , the reversal, the composition, the tones) in the service of the communicative purpose here without a real point of reference unless the only hypothesis of the contextual presence of the work and of its user: whoever looks, in fact, understands everything. Vulnerability and failure - the sense blows. Suddenly comes the sense, it blows, it bangs: this is a project vulnerable to perception beyond vision. Vulnerability, therefore, as a measure of courage, as an act of resilience and as a condition for adapting to the change of things. Into Venuto al modo, this quality of human being is also investigated thanks to the connection with technical vulnerability: on the one hand the material footprint of the support and the other on the nature of orthochromatic film. This last aspect is decisive: take off spectrum to see more. The film is particularly vulnerable to the resumption of landscapes because it is not sensitive to the red spectrum of reds and greens. This inadequateness related to the imposed use makes it extraordinarily effective as it moves the limits of its incisiveness. In this respect, the practice of cruelty and poetics, of induction to error (technical, linguistic and narrative) is added as an instrument of freedom, evolution and expansion of perception, in a logic of struggle for the sense of norm and control by the limited authority exercised by the author. It is therefore about learning the renunciation. To give up the spectrum, give up the frames, give up the direct sense, give up the representation, and ultimately renounce the rhetoric of the (high)fidelity of the images: while making it, intimately deny the photo-graphy and fail with grandeur. Memory and mountain - ask an artist to deal with his own shame and he will produce his greatest work. Or at least, that's what he will pretend to believe. Venuto al modo is the joyful ritual of the transfiguration of reality and, once again, of memory. This project is (and will continue to be) realized into the high valley of Rhêmes (Aosta - Italy). On the east wall of the small church of Rhêmes Notre-Dame village, next to the main entrance, there is a stone plate well laid out in the wall that recites: Ici reposent dans le Seigneur les derniers des authentiques Zemoz de Rhêmes N. Dame [... ] Passants semez une prière pour nous elle reaîtra un jour pour vous (Here rest in the Lord the last of the authentic Zemoz of Rhêmes N. Dame [...] Passers sow a prayer for us she reatre one day for you). The last. The Authentic. To take certain stories seriously, I may not what I am and I might be what I am not. If so, then I give up: I do not exist. Here it remains only the desire to meet the other: the mountain and its rhetoric of verticality, not so much the one that brings you up, or that brings you beyond, but rather the one that brings you down, on the inside. Here is again, for the last time, the contextual presence of the work and its user, in the happy illusion: the one who looks, in fact, understands everything.