literature

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of the Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography ¹.

When I think about photography, I constantly feel a sense of vertigo similar to that which Calvino alludes to in several passages of his literature and to which he admits in his Lezioni americane [American Lessons]: the one on Esattezza [Exactitude]: the fascination, in artistic creation, for oscillation between combinatory processes and geometrising synthesis on the one hand, and an expressive ‘mannerist' deviation aroused by an attraction for the infinite on the other. The former involves striving to find a “siliceous structure of existence”² in terms of a secret and general order that sustains the world, making it intelligible; the latter is a mathesis singularis³ (to use Roland Barthes' expression), such as science of the particular and the unique.
In fact, anyone who uses photography, albeit with different degrees of awareness, must sooner or later tackle the dialectics between its synthetic potential and its innate ‘analytical and dispersive' potential.
All photography moves between these two extremes: between the obsession to create strongly iconic images that are emblematic, ‘definitive' and ‘immortal', and the entropic, dispersive and chaotic nature that characterises both a certain use of image and the mass consumption of the same.
When faced with the undeniable complexity of reality and contemporary communication, I like to think of the photographer as a collector and cartographer, figures that were dear not only to Calvino and Borges, but also to master photographers such as Luigi Ghirri or Joachim Schmid, to name but two; figures loaded with allusion, that synthesise metaphorically the problems and questions inherent in the relationship between man, image and the world.
Calvino gave an exemplary form to these very problems in hisCollezione di sabbia [Collection of Sand], the oxymoronic title of which recalls the intriguing theme of striving to impose order on something that is naturally formless. The writer describes here the passion for collecting as a need that is often existential, primary, sometimes even obsessional of clarity and intellectual dominion of the world, insofar as taking an object and creating a collection means organising, arranging and cataloguing something that had previously been foundering in formlessness and in the pre-rationale, in an attempt to restore an order and an intelligibility, if not original then at least specific.
When collecting, we succeed in dominating not only space but also time, as Baudrillard writes in his Le système des objets⁴, [System of Objects], interweaving them in order to renew the understanding and shaping of reality; an operation characterised by its radicalisation of the sense of sight and by its striving towards all-inclusiveness and for its attempt to follow the analytic exploration of the entire world with strict control and an optical and conceptual rationalisation of it.

When we think about what it means to produce images today, in an era marked by the constant and excessive proliferation of the same, conveyed through the most disparate channels of communication, to the extent that they invade every sphere of our lives, we cannot help but question the sense of creation as an operation that adds even a single image to the unending heap of icons generated by our day and age.
The more the number of images grows, the more I feel that it is important to dwell further on the critical moment of the reflection and the judgement of the same. From this derives the relevance of a photographic activity intended not as the individual creation of a post-romantic genius, but as an extreme, well-planned, rational and measured exercise in selecting from the endless array of images on offer: an attempt to wrench from the sand of the world, from an erosion of forms that is often accompanied by a stripping of all critical sense, a collection of meaningful fragments bound by a common horizon of meaning.
I recall the story with its typically surreal atmosphere in which Borges⁵ tells of a 1:1 scale geographical map of an imaginary empire that, covering and corresponding perfectly to the physical space it represents, proves to be unusable and useless. With his tale, the Argentinian writer offers us a reflection on the problematic nature of all summarising and ‘marking' operations in the world; he does so by describing a map that flaunts its proud autonomy as an object, first intellectual and then material, and that metaphorically expands and branches out like appendages of the mind; it multiplies and renews itself, each time proclaiming the ambiguous and dual nature of the relationship between thought and reality.
As though standing before this Borghesian map, which is, at the same time, the most realistic and most abstract possible, our sense of alienation before this Babel of images, with which contemporary communication bombards us everyday, urges us to make our move on the world's chessboard, to make our choices, and to venture into a committed and responsible act of critical selection

In myCollezione di Sabbia cycle, I decided to tackle the enormous iconographic receptacle that is the Internet, which is, par excellence, a universe that is both multiform and fragmentary, as well as being, at times, ambiguous and random. Like a Shusaku Arakawa painting⁶, this sort of contemporary ‘hyper-map' conceals a twin ‘dimension' because it is contained in a space of which it is simultaneously the ‘container', and it stimulates a spiral mental and visual process of regression and inclusion ad infinitum, similar to the one Josiah Royce incisively describes with another imaginary map in The World and the Individual⁷.
And it is indeed the metaphoric image of the spiral as it appears at the end of Le Cosmicomiche⁸ [Cosmicomics] that I would consider to be the emblem of my work. The spiral works itself into an infinite spiralling movement the centre of which is inaccessible and thus unreachable. This image perfectly evokes the mechanism of memory, which travels backwards without ever being able to illuminate every aspect of the reminiscence and the assumptions of the same because the journey is towards a remote origin, a generative punctum that is always blurred. Furthermore, it conjures up the Merleau-Pontian image of creating a historic and perceptive vision within reality, so that the act of seeing itself, although the mirror with which the world watches itself, is always blind to its ultimate nature and to its own ‘centre'⁹.
My exploration of the ‘spaces' on the Web is intended as an acknowledgement of this experience and this feeling of blindness and oblivion in a constant inquiry into the radical nature of our relationship with vision.
As I delve deeper into this new and immense camera obscura, I query the meaning of photographic creation in a dialectical confrontation with this ‘mind-space', a quantum continuum that constitutes an ambiguous, fluid, dynamic, metamorphic and omnivorous dimension, a vast collection that embraces human and post-human, a ‘collection of all collections', one that proposes a fresh new relationship with images and their history that is completely different from the practices of the past.
I wanted to look at this territory of hybridation with a ‘coldness' not dissimilar to the one Alain Robbe-Grillet uses in his narrative work, in which the forms of the technical-productive world, described with the maximum objective depersonalisation, become interior, “become a gaze”¹⁰, and culminate in a deep interiorisation, in a personal way of relating to and interpreting reality.
This ‘shipwreck' horizon in the sea of contemporary images unleashed by the Web, halfway between interiority of the ‘mind' and of the machine and absolute exteriority, seems to evoke meanderings within an eternal labyrinth suspended between entropy and form, between chaos and kosmos: that which Antonino Paraggi ultimately has to contend with at the end of L'avventura di un fotografo¹¹ [The Adventure of a Photographer], now aware that photography, this ‘surreal tautology', takes its place in a story which is, in a certain sense, stationary and which renews itself continuously, by posing itself, almost obsessively, a few essential questions.

In my ‘photographs' I have attempted to create a space perennially divided between form and its dissolution, as instable and multiform as thought, penumbral and mysterious; a fluctuating dimension of ambiguous mimesis, “magma”¹² that accepts every doublure and becomes an object of metaphotography. While, on one hand, this evolution is consistent with my earlier photographic cycles, on the other it is loaded with an unprecedented aspect of cultural and civil awareness.
The ‘historical present' which is the setting for my images in Collezione di Sabbia is an unlimited plane where past and future blend, a place where I no longer query recognisable moments or models in the history of art, but aim, rather, to evoke the progressiveness of the perpetuation and renewal of the significant forms and the transitory nature of the relations between the same; the core of my work thus becomes the radical question as to the sense and the development of the creative process as a communicative activity in a broad sense, in a consistent refusal to exhibit any authorial originality in terms of purely formal stylistic recognition.
In this sense, the ‘theft' and the taking from others' work is an attempt to evoke the ‘mechanism' that underlies the entire ‘system of images' by directing renewed attention to the problematic depth of its non-superstructural aspects. Besides, Calvino too maintained that “translating is the most absolute way of reading”¹³, in that it is the most important way of revealing the structural dimension hidden within works and texts and of reprocessing their form and meaning. In this perspective, in my work, in parts, the serenity and lightness of a copier, - peacefully reconciling the dimension of reception with that of reprocessing - may be perceived.
Nonetheless, the questions raised by Collezione di Sabbia are also addressed to the Web as a dimension that radically condenses and creates the most important aspects of the system that mass-produces and distributes images, as analysed by Vilém Flusser in Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie¹⁴ [Towards a Philosophy of Photography].

Being cybernetic appendages, photographic and icon reproduction equipment plan our lives by encouraging the suppression of critical thought and through a rampant visual “illiteracy”¹⁵ at the service of the economic and political system behind the image industry; these images spill onto the Web, onto television and into other communication channels asking nothing more than to be consumed uncritically.

Like Flusser, we need to seek strategies to retrieve within photographic “space-time¹⁶ that dimension of freedom and intellectual incisiveness that the equipment, machines, apparatus and the media establishment are all trying to anaesthetise, forcing us into servile inurement to the superfluous images they advocate. To this end, we must gain full awareness not only of the cultural, but also the civil, political and social significance of the reflection on the relationship between man and image in an idolatrous era¹⁷ such as ours.
Is a photographer a thinker who continues to question the meaning of existence or simply a “homo ludens¹⁸ who has fallen into a critical and conceptual stupor?
Are we here to perform all of the camera's functions mechanically or to exercise our own free will?
I sense that it is increasingly more urgent and essential for photography to seek a language that does not indulge in magniloquence and self-glorification, but one that emerges from silence; one that sets itself the task of ‘listening' continuously to all that is difficult to express, to the invisible that surrounds us.
I would like to see a photography that is a genuine interweaving of horizons where thought and the world continuously merge; through which to reconstruct our collection, our history, a continuity of memory relative to a dimension of time that is shattered, incoherent, and “scattered randomly on the rough surface of space”¹⁹.

January 2008

Marco Campanini