literature

In an age dominated by images, should our relationship with images be anything but aware and critical?
Space as a dimension seems to have prevailed over time and history, and our daily lives are increasingly characterised by a form of visual bulimia that takes the form of a frenetic scanning of the images with which the media in its many forms bombard our eyes. These “significant surfaces”¹ swarm, dive, swirl and crisscross before our glance, which can either resign itself to decoding them passively, travelling inertly over their texture, or which can take a critical look at their semantic and ontological depth, and at the historical and political meaning of each and every one of them.
In my works, Gli Spazi dell'Utopia, Grand Tour, and Isolario, I thought of the ‘imaginary plane' which I framed and on which I worked - dense with forms and semantic concretions - as the effect of a gaze that both questions and evokes, in a radical sense, an image's deepest meaning; by comparison, the act of focusing becomes a crossing, a penetration, a physical, intellectual and spiritual journey into the image itself. In this analysis, I turn my attention to “prehistoric”² images taken from the pictorial tradition, which, for this very reason, are imbued with explicit symbolic meaning. Investigating this meaning, I attempt to reassert the need for a phenomenological epoché of our relationship with all forms of representation. My criticism, however, also indirectly calls “post-historical”³ images into play, as well as the production and consumption mechanisms that involve them. Mine is an act of reflection on and emancipation from these mechanisms and from the power of the technical images that the media industry regurgitates on us, day-in day-out; images which “are, in truth, images, and as such, they are symbolical. In fact, they are even more an abstracted, symbolical complex than traditional images”⁴.
My question concerning the symbolic depth of the “prehistorical images”, as a consequence, that of the “post-historical” images as well, is an appeal for the emancipation of those who, in the broadest sense, use photographic means and technical images, in the hope that from being mere ‘functionnaires' of the system they might rise to become ‘philosophers of the image'.

October 2007

Marco Campanini