DON’T MAKE THEM TELL YOU WHERE THEY COME FROM: in conversation with Daniele Marzorati

>Metronom: The title of the exhibition Don’t Make Them Tell You Where They Come From reflects on the creative process, and on the relationship between the work and the reality from which it is generated. How do you think your works fit into this reflection?

>Daniele Marzorati: Asking where one comes from means asking for the proper identity of the person or object, it means being naked and being yourself without pretending or staging. It is probably impossible to think of something without referring to the representation that replaces the object itself in our head, but trying to look at that object by eliminating its representation is perhaps the most sincere effort to knowledge. My works often use very classical languages: film photography with contact printing, drawing and oil painting; I would just like to let them interact; in short, I don’t believe in monoculture. By putting them alongside sometimes I doubt the point at which the work was generated, but this is not the purpose I set myself. I rather like the operations of translation and displacement: through subtle passages, they completely modify the sense of the starting object without almost changing its appearance. I believe this difference is revolutionary, to do lot with nothing. Using this logic without any profit would be a first point to re-establish a parity between the finished object and the place where it was generated. Asking what is the relationship between the work and the context that generated it means to question the history, then the origin of it, to discover the structure and what lies beneath it. This is done starting from the surface, from how it appears possible to observe the details that constitute it and go below. So the idea of using photography as a cast, contact printing or, in other works, frottage, means to adhere to the surface, trying to bring back in an identical way the point from which the work is generated. It is therefore possible to arrive at the roots of the image through an almost philological research that starts from what the surface shows, from the figures that replace meanings beyond their object form. This means having created a container capable of revealing something other than itself, it means being able to move our thinking from the surface, from the visual and, through the image, to go beyond the reality that generated it.

>M: In the work It Is What It Was – Yorick (2019) you reproduce with oil painting a photograph preserved in the Archive of the Jardin de l’Agronomie Tropical in Paris. What dictated this choice and this change of expressive medium?

>DM: Painting is one of the most elusive media and in this case it is clear that mine is evasive, it was a repetition of a mechanism that I partly know. You can try to repeat one thing to get to know it better. The learning process, which can then turn into discovery, I believe considers repetition not as a generator of perfect clones, but as a producer of knowledge by difference. In this case the passage between photography and painting allows us to repeat the forms, the painting seems to make the verse to photography, approaching it visually and using some of its means; the oil is painted on paper instead of being on canvas and the frame has glass, there is no painting shell. The attempt is to use the two languages as collaborating banks, one generates the other and gradually moves. Often in my work painting derives from a photograph, I would like to have them work in both directions. Even painting can be the starting point for a new photograph, not only visually – that is a framing model – but it could be the “playmaker” that directs the photographs in tow. In addition, the work should do without this combination, the various parts should be a sort of “Pulp Fiction” in which everything flows simultaneously and explodes, thus joining the fragments and realigning the points, without giving a full certainty of what it generates and who it is generated by it.

>M: In Tronco tripla – Sezioni (2016), you pull together three shots of portions of a forest in Sardinia on a single negative printed in contact. What kind of narration of the Sardinian nature do you want to suggest to the observer?

>DM: I wouldn’t suggest any narration, there are three scenes that represent the same object seen from different positions, the rest is up to you. Photography has become a reproduction mechanism to which conceptual superstructures are applied to justify the visual impotence of the image produced. Photography does not need it, it is already more conceptual than itself: an imperfect copy, by difference, of physical objects. Choosing a part of the world, cutting it and censoring what is adjacent to it to re-establish a series of relationships between the objects it contains is already a powerful and complex operation, even from a conceptual point of view. In Tronco tripla I have strengthened and reiterated this step. Using a superclassical kind of photography, that is a large-format negative of 20 x 25 cm in black and white, I hijacked the framing mechanism, on the negative itself, three different exposures with the same scene, directly during the shooting. Hypothetically I could connect very distant spaces and approach them on the same plane in the territory of the negative, as in other scenes belonging to this series. So I would say that it is the image and the individual fragments of it that build the narrative. The goal is to make sure that every time someone looks at the image, they can build an a-linear narrative and the image does it with him, but it’s not me who imposes it.

>M: In Tutti i diritti sono riservati (2019) what is the relationship between marble sculpture, photography and printing? Can you explain how the title of the work communicates with it?

>DM: Working in Carrara is like being inside an immense sculpture, the landscape is constantly changing, even if we don’t realize it. You breathe it in the air, and the mountains and white are so close, so present that they spread on everything. The relationship between sculpture, photography and printing is once again linked to the idea of the mold. I wanted to work on the landscape and with marble, but without extracting a part of the mountain again. Working with the cast that photography produces by observing the marble of the monument to Alberto Meschi and using a panoramic format, 6 x 12 cm, which develops horizontally, means working on both. Also years ago I had collaborated with A-magazine and published some of my works (among which Sezioni, the series Tronco triplais part of), so I decided to collaborate with the Cooperativa Tipografica Anarchica and re-unite the place where the work was generated in to its theoretical contents. Let me explain myself better: working with anarchist typography means accepting it as a social sculpture, sharing its organization, and in a broad sense, the history and dissemination of content that it promotes. It also means not using industrial systems and getting these contents into work, not only theoretically, but through a series of visible choices. For this reason the clichés we have produced are obtained using their bromograph: the negatives are placed on the plates, they are exposed to light and then developed. Currently the printing plates are digitally printed: the bromograph has instead allowed me to use the same procedure as the photo by contact printing. Typographic clichés can be printed only if sent to France as the Carrara printing company gave away the machine with which they printed these plates to another French anarchist group. The ones I used were an unsold stock usable only with that machine. In this sense I have combined the theoretical assumptions of the place with the physical space in which the plates were generated. These last details interest me to open the work again. For now the slabs are a very thin sculpture and hold a potential, that is the possibility of producing an open and infinite sculpture through the printing of posters that can be applied on any surface, building or other statue. This seems to me to have reached its initial aim, to produce a new sculpture without using marble, to work on the landscape as a shared object, on the sculpture-city of Carrara and to restore the unexpressed potential of marble. The title backs up all these ideas.

© Marco Daniele Marzorati / Courtesy METRONOM