Lundi 19 Janvier 2015 17:54:39 par actuphoto dans Expositions

For her solo show at Francesca Minini, Deborah Ligorio presents a series of portraits based on the calculation of the carbon footprint of individuals from a group of friends and friends of friends. Prior to the opening of the show, the gallery will be hosting a workshop from the series [ the Eponym ]: on lifelogging, nature-culture, and body exercises. As a discursive event some elements from the workshop will remain on display for the show, such as the sequence of short trailers, brief videos of around half a minute or less, that accompany the workshop virtually.

The show explores the dynamic and complex nature of scientific practices; it observes its economies of profit and loss. The profile of a person based on their data is used by IT industry to market customized products. Such portraits are constantly generated by social networks. The show examines and observes the way in which the materiality of our incorporation and the measuring tools we use to observe, understand and describe the world determine our very perception of it.

One example is global warming: we know that it is happening thanks to scientific measurements, because the perceptible effects are only aesthetic effects that are directly coincidental. But at the same time the very measures we decide to take are themselves the result of a scientific way of looking at things. In order to create the works on display and calculate the C02 emissions the artist made use of a tool available online. The multiple-choice system presents itself as a production boundary practice that is in itself formative of a behavioral standard. As it does not take into account important nuances of behavior, it seems clear that this, like other similar tools, is optimized for the life system of the western world. The show places itself in a dialectical negotiation of the boundaries, limits and materiality produced by the tool or apparatus used. The term “Apparatus”, according to the theorist Karen Barad, indicates “specific discursive-material practices (which are not only laboratory configurations that incorporate human concepts and take measurements); the apparatuses produce differences that count: they are boundary-production practices that are full of material and meaning - producers, and a part, of the phenomenon produced”.

Deborah Ligorio, with the series of portraits from the data on carbon emissions, has realized a series of visualizations: small- format canvases, the result of the translation of the data and the observation of quantitative and qualitative aspects of the habits of the subjects portrayed. The canvases mix collages and acrylics on various materials. These materials used as backdrops are mounted onto looms, and chosen each time to describe the characteristics of the person portrayed. A string wrapped around the canvases corresponds to the amount of movements; the calculation was done over a period of one year.
The interface, or the magnitude that we use to look at the world can also be defined as scale. As the environmental historian Marco Armiero writes, “ [ ... ] the scale that we choose to adopt changes the way in which we understand problems, and frame solutions. Consider for example certain severe environmental laws, which when applied in wealthy countries simply caused the movement of dangerous production to poorer countries with less rigid environmental laws, in what is known as 'environmental dumping'.”
The same system of knowledge that uses these separations, at the same time provides the scientific tools with which to visualize the planet as an ecosystem, where all of its parts are interconnected, even though this aspect is widely denied by the policy of only taking care of one’s own garden.

The theorist Timothy Morton states : "Unlike Latour, I do think have been modern, and this has affected human beings and non-human beings. [...]
Now we know where things are going. For some time we may have though that the U-curve in the bathroom was a comfortable curve of ontological space that brought everything that we throw in it away into a totally different dimension called Elsewhere, leaving everything clean on this side. But now we know that instead of this mythical land of Elsewhere, waste goes into the Pacific Ocean and into sewage disposal plant. Knowledge of the Earth hyperobject, and of the biosphere hyperobject, presents us with sticky surfaces from which nothing can be forcibly removed.” The show is based on the premise that the same connectivity and the same impossibility of disentangling human and non-human lives, animate and inanimate worlds, the intertwinings of material objects and immaterial data. That same stickiness is indeed what links the infinity of data in this expanse of algorithmic gardens and the materiality of which we become accessories.