A perplexing book, Vittorio Mortarotti’s new publication Soil, released this year by Skinnerboox, hints at, amongst other topics, lives lived at the margins of political existence. It does this without ever pushing an obvious agenda or confirming the bias. Throughout the book, certain themes recur. There is a specific anti-narrative device at play where one may infer the totality of intention but never have it confirmed. This, of course, falls in line with a few great books released this year, such as J.M. Ramirez-Suassi’s Malparaiso, in particular.

I think of them as kindred books, though the periphery of my interpretation of their intentions differs. I associate them with pictorial compositional motivations, not their subject matter, whatever that might be. With Mortarotti, there is a subtle hint about refugees, Europe, and how people, disinherited from their homeland soil, seek refuge elsewhere. However, this is only part of the inference I have gleaned from looking through the lyrical black and white and color photographs, some of which are simple fragments of objects, decayed votives sent from one world to be observed in another, a quantum spectacle that in essence may never have existed when viewed from afar. There are images of terrain that are jagged and simple, and the invisible boundaries that we associate with known territory or a sense of Heimat are questioned. We have come to put so much emphasis on simple geographic geology. You could have been born on any piece of it.

There are echoes of marginalization in Soil. You find it in rooms filled with debris, tattered clothing, and plastic bottles shrouding the floor. You see it written on the walls, illegible and indecipherable communique from a world in which brief passings are as much confirmation of meaning as are the hand scratching their surfaces, the world, a blackened chalkboard. In these images, an indentured parallel to Brassaï, Paul Graham, and the caves of Lascaux and Altamira provide a correlative value of associative scrawls and markings. There is something primordial in the script. I would not say that it is desperate, but the soils above beds, the graffiti, and the transient indoor settings ask us to navigate them and scan them to make illusory motifs for our search for meaning. It is not altogether different from being given a flashlight with only one battery.

There are suggestions of rituals and belief systems indigenous to lands left by proximity to conjecture. Skulls, wax, a bare life vodun encroaches the frame, asking what we might interpret from the assembly of images and objects, which also includes therapeutic hypnosis, another form of searching abandonment, much like the religiosity hinted at in the photos of the skulls, the sacred chamber of grit, dirt, and fire. Fire plays a role in the book but is never used as artifice. It exists without lamentation, without symbolic manifestation; it is elemental, like the soil itself. The hypnosis images may suggest how we view photos of other journeymen in their flight from a comfortable seated position. It might suggest manipulation care or even dormancy. These images of white hypnotized individuals are a bulwark against the bodies of individuals from less prosperous soil. In the end, both are birthed from the chaos of chance.

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“He who seeks to approach his buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter, to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. ” Walter Benjamin, Excavation and memory

This is a book of deep inner subjectivity. The political marginalia that I have hinted at comes from understanding the books Mortarotti has published before, some of which hold a thin and airable bag of political suggestion. However, the bag refuses to keep its contents tightly, preferring to let them drain from the framework of its shape to the outside world, left to be maximalized by the reader. A political will is present in the work, but inherent in this is a denial to document, enlighten, and share information.

Instead, it is a personal series of observations woven together like a fine tapestry, edited and sequenced with a formalist approach to repetition, serial images, and motifs that make the book experience otherworldly, psychologically loaded with the author as much as what he photographs. This inner excavation, the assembly of aggregate character traits, is the basis for what we see and relate. In this, the book is a complete success and falls in line with a general trend away from telling stories toward sharing visions. It is one of my top picks of the year so far. Please don’t sleep on it.

Vittorio Mortarotti

Soil

Skinnerboox

March 2024

26,5×31,5 cm
104 pages + gatefolds
Hardcover with dustjacket
ISBN 978-88-94895-71-1
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Designed by Marianna Fassio