Published by Witty Books in 2023 and designed by Giulia Boccarossa, Sofia Masini’s first photobook The body is a revelation as is landscape experiments with reconfigurations of the artist’s body and of the world it inhabits. Through a series of images in which both body and landscape are cut, disassembled, xeroxed, crumpled, recycled, multiplied and reincarnated in polymorphous forms, the book weaves together human and non-human fractures, recombining them in a single, unpredictable body. Doubtlessly reminiscent of (and influenced by) Surrealist and Dada photography of the 1920s and of body-land-performance art of the 1970s, the images that make up this body of work span from “straight” photographs of the landscape to assemblages of fragmented photographs. While tempting, one can hardly call Masini’s assemblages a “collage”, as none of the pieces are actually glued together. Bodies are cut and recombined in endlessly different configurations, becoming fixed only through the act of photography. Through these material actions Masini complicates the body’s performativity in the landscape, extending it further into the photographic process. If temporality and ephemerality are a key characteristic of the performative arts – in that they necessitate documentation in order to leave a trace of the event in time – her assembled pictures can also be thought of as an event, as something that happens and changes into various iterations in time and space. The body is performed in the landscape, cut up, and performed once again as a photographic, material object on the surface of a table, layered onto and woven into bits of rocks, seashells and water that, in turn, disrupt and re-perform the landscape. Paying close attention, one can find the same fragments reappearing in various combinations through the book, or can match a shape to a negative space found on another page.
What to make of this objecthood? In art history the association between nature and the female body has been marked by a not unproblematic idea of an ‘authentic’ femininity associated with wilderness, with the womb, and with fantasies of origin. Assumptions concerning authenticity have been a central aspect in the struggle over representation that arose from traditional emancipatory practices, which have been characterised – and to a large extent, still are – by the desire to become a subject. As noted by Hito Steyerl in her text A thing like you and me, these concerns are based on a series of presuppositions, the most problematic of which is the assumption that an authentic image exists in the first place.[1] Cut and recycled, xeroxed and repurposed, the body-photo of Masini is a copy of a copy of a copy that bears little direct relationship to its original individual body, shifting the paradigm of identification with the subject to an active participation in the materiality of photographs. Participating in the materiality of the image, in its forces and desires, Masini makes photographic objects that manifestly carry tears and cuts, bruises and wounds. These are manifest both in the assemblages and in her photographs of the landscape, that often depict broken pillars, fractured grounds, scarred surfaces, and so forth. All these surfaces – the body’s, the land’s, the photographs’ – are teased and tested by the artist. And they hold. The traces of the traumas recorded by all bodies – of beings and of things – are woven together into a new archive.
The book design remains true to the artist’s low-fi approach. Printed in monotone on A4, relatively thin paper and held together by a metal spiral bound, the book presents itself like a notebook. The cover is like any other page (white, with a black and white photograph), only a little bit thicker. It is a fragile book. Easily bruised, easily dirtied, nearly impossible to keep pristine in time, it feels like it is inviting me to tear some pages out and make my own cuts and recombinations of the work. The spiral that holds the pages together and the cover-that-is-not-a-cover invite a cyclical reading of the work, as any page could be the cover, and the sequence could start and end anywhere along the way.
The author’s choice of the word ‘landscape’ rather than any other word to refer to the land gave me much to think about. The concept of landscape embodies notions of human representation, organization and control of land, which becomes culturally constructed. Central to landscape is the role of the viewer; it requires a beholder to set the parameters of scope and depth, and the body’s position and orientation within it define the axis and framing of the scene, positioning the outer limits of sight, usually located at the horizon. Yet, in Masini’s assemblages the body of the beholder looking upon the land (the artist) ceases to navigate the world, but rather emerges from it: they burst out of each other with discomfort and joy, her human face learning to become inhuman, a thing, a rock, a picture. In her assemblages there is no cohesive, orderly landscape to navigate and map; no cohesive, orderly human body to control. In this regard, I would have liked to see the author push and radicalize her interventions and assemblages even further, abandoning the straight vistas that have been kept in the sequence. Whilst many of the uncut photographs still maintain a strange quality in which depth and orientation are difficult to figure out, some of them – particularly those featuring a vertical, central object that organises the land around it – take me back to a dimension of separation.
Despite the simile in the title, The body is a revelation as is landscape does not draw a metaphor between the human body and the land by means of pathetic fallacy or other poetic devices of the sort, where one thing is similar to, but still separate from, another. Rather, it is an attempt to take the human body, resize it and reinsert it within the web of relations that make up this world. It is a body that does not want to exist as a lonely monad, but that wants to return to the mass of beings and things that exist only in relation to each other and that co-create existence. In the book Strangers: Essays on the Human and the Nonhuman, Rebecca Tamás states that “to adopt an ecological way of thinking […] is to recognize the terrible intimacy of the nonhuman within us, and to accept this difference that rubs up against and inside us”. [2] It is precisely when the human and nonhuman rub together in painful and in pleasurable ways that I find this body of work at its strongest, able to meet the inhuman with hospitality.
–
Footnotes:
[1] Steyerl, Hito (2012) A thing like you and me, The Wretched of the Screen, pp.50-51, Sternberg Press: Berlin
[2] Tamás, Rebecca (2022), On Hospitality, Strangers: Essays on the Human and the Nonhuman, pp.31, Makina Press: UK
