Interview with Aqua Aura

by Filippo Cecconi, July 2019

I/Who is Aqua Aura? Why did you choose this pseudonym?
A.A.: It is a long story. Even too long, I would say. I should bring you to the dark dungeons of the entire paths of the existence and let you go through details that would take the space of an entire interview. For sure I will not expose anyone to such a torment.
What I can say is that “Aqua Aura” is a kind of a synthetic stone. Originally, it is a quartz. Quartz crystals are put in a vacuum chamber and heated to 871 °C (1,600 °F). Then gold steam is added to the chamber so that the gold atoms fuse to the crystal’s surface, giving the crystals an iridescent metallic sheen and a vivid blue color. The proximity to gold makes it luminous and iridescent but, at the same time, more fragile than its starting condition. That’s all. I am one of those stones. Time and a slow process have settled on me. The exposure to a blinding light and the proximity to the immense fire of a volcano changed me.

II/You define your digital artworks as “meta-photography”. Why did you choose this specific technique rather than traditional photography? What are you trying to tell us with it?
AA: Using the term”meta-photography” I mean all those processes or methods that are necessary for the “representation of things” every time that the traditional tools we are used to consider – cameras, video cameras, drawings and others – are not enough.
When the perception of the world wants to go beyond physical appearances and penetrate the “Essence” from a vertical perspective instead of a horizontal one, you need new, or alternative, kind of tools. In other words, meta-photography becomes necessary when you want to show the reality in its invisible or trans-dimensional components, in an attempt to bring to light the mystery of representation that is inherent in the things themselves and in their phenomena.
However, I would not like to be misunderstood: my attitude is not messianic or esoteric, purely visionary or irrational. On the contrary, it is the result of a thorough analysis about the processes of perception.
We can say that our world has developed a series of instruments that have multiplied the layers of reality in which we live by making them visible. We have invented machines that amplify the human natural “seeing”, so placing us in a condition of perpetual oscillation between the molecules of the infinitely small and the unimaginable vastness of cosmic radiations. Whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, the possibilities of our perception contain infinite layers of “storytelling”.  In some ways, we live in a beyond-world that contains the infinite possibility of the world itself. The meta-photography is a hybrid that collects all the “tools for seeing”, distills them drop by drop and, when the outcomes of a specific instrument are no longer enough, it slips into the next instrument which, for whatever reason, offers other possibilities to the gaze. It is a sort of process that leads to a new hyper-realism, to a hypertrophy of perception that produces a glimpse on the complexity of reality. The meta-photographic images are fragmentary, like the set of small particles from other images, portions of representation gathered by an infinite number of people, non-sequential pixels of reality that stay united thanks to very thin bonds and all together they are in a constant vibration generating an image. The meta-photographic image is a paradox; although it is the result of real representations on concrete phenomena, its “appearance” seems to move in a space that it is straddling between the real and the imaginary. Once this condition was entrusted to painting. However, painting by its nature is univocal, homogeneous, a constant flow that generates narrative. Our age, on the other hand, is fragmented, multi-layered, parcelled. In the end, meta-photography seems to me more relevant in representing our “being” right here, right now.

III/Could you tell us more about your creative process? How does the genesis of the artwork happen?
A.A.: Over the last few years, the veiled project behind my work has become much clearer to me: the purpose, I am convinced, is to build a hyperbolic portrait of the world, even if something similar already exists and is represented by “the Web”. The Web is the mirror of the things which can be, somehow, represented. It is at the same time so apparently neutral and ruthless that it succeed in incorporating into its channels both the truth of the world and its falsity. The Web is a forest of images and “floating” data, to which we have access through computers, smartphones or tablets. The whole of this universe forms the immense archive of what exists. Every corner of the planet and much of the known universe are kept in some recesses of this forest.
What I am talking about is an abstract mirror, almost indistinguishable in its details. It is an infinitely fragmented and anti-unitary deposit and we can only see a few portions of it at a time. Probably the vastness of its entirety would provoke, on us, a state of dizziness similar to terror or to bewilderment. The hyper-production of documents in its cells eliminates reality itself, as the summing of the colors gives white; just like in an empty picture where the radiation of light (or information) waves has reached the mutism of the absolute white light. My utopian challenge is to collect some threads from this tangle and intertwine images made of portions of this existing pre-contest. Such interlaced fragments are sometimes held together by simple story pretexts or specific themes I have chosen. It is not important where the original images come from. In some cases they come from my shoots, sometimes from strangers who participate in the overproduction of the web or of its sub-archives. What I would like to remain in each of my images is the profound nature of this hyper-eye and the vastness of its components, which, ultimately, are the summing of all the eyes of its users and creators. In the “huge archive”, reality is built, dismantled and rebuilt every day. I like the idea that in this Meta-Portrait the last consequence of the Sublime could exist and persist in a sort of terrifying emotion and, at the same time, in a state of euphoria. Well, it must be said, the outcome of my challenge is always an image or an experience, somehow, aesthetic or visual. The web, by its nature, follows an entropic process. It moves from accumulation and tends to “chaos”.
This condition is unacceptable when you are working on the creation of an image or on any other kind of work that has to do with the perceptions end with senses. As part of the “construction” of what it is necessary for identifying paths, it is necessary to establish hierarchies and a supporting structure. The creation of a piece or work, as Roland Barthes has argued, is an algebraic calculation. In order not to renounce to his “sensuality” the work must tend to abstraction by way of its internal compositional mathematics.
Talking about the genesis of the works, I think the creative process follows an anarchic path. There are no predefined rules. Some works have a crystalline definition in the moment itself when they are conceived, other times they are the result of a long gestation. In the studio, or in my mind, I set up a scientific research laboratory full of slides, on which I distribute microorganisms of an idea and infinitely small fragments of an intuition and then I watch them interacting with each other.
Looking at them, I see the changing of their morphology, I analyse their mutation and I trace the curve of their mutual interference. Sometimes the experiment is sterile and destined for failure but many other times it is not.

IV/Please tell us more about your latest series “Museum Highlights”
A.A.: I often reflect on the phenomenon of things that are disappearing and will never return into the world scene. Of these things, in their process of dissolution, I like to note their poetic component. Destined for nothingness, they bring me a poignant emotion. They make me experience
a feeling of nostalgia also when they are still present. In a “cruel” indifference, they are vanishing and nobody cares or, more simply, seems to notice this event and the related importance. … to be honest, our current world is full of these disappearing things. Certainly many other things and many other phenomena, completely new, are coming on the scene and for sure they play, or will play in the future, their own game, but of the latter I know nothing, for me they are perfect strangers. For the others, on the contrary, I know very well some of them. They have been friendly presences and tender traveling companions and I feel pain for their death. Among these, I am struck by the fate of the glaciers, the last outposts of the cold and desolate lands in an infinite/finite wilderness.
In my recent work, I have documented a lot about the data concerning the processes that involve the dissolving of ice, the disappearing of fauna and the consumption of natural soil. The trends of their deterioration are disconcerting. In any case, I chose to focus attention precisely on the ice, on the land of poles and on high altitude glaciers. Actually, I focused attention so much that ice has become one of my key representation subjects.
Reflecting on this topic, I then began to analyse all the materials of my personal archive, from the images I collected myself over the years during my travels, up to all the “stolen” images found surfing the Net. I wondered what we could keep of these things after the process of their
disappearance. Ultimately, all this various “disappearing objects” of the nature seemed to me like to become museum objects. The need to transfer an object in the museum context arises when this specific thing has come out of the flow of “The Becoming” and its ability to regenerate and act on the dynamics of transformation no longer directly affects the reality. I imagined that in the future, or in a timeless time, a boy or a girl, an individual of the next generations, to live the experience of ice and to feel the sense of the snow or the vastness of the Arctic desolation, might have, as the only alternative, the visit to these hypothetical “museums of missing things”. I selected from my archive images of museums that I visited, and shots taken from journeys to the Arctic or Antarctic areas, and with them I began to build fictitious places, imaginary museums that
contain and show fragments of lost landscapes: portions of frozen forests, icebergs , snow crystals in macroscopic dimensions and other elements. Even if the MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS series is just at the beginning, working on it I realised that these imaginary spaces represent metaphysical places. The objects represented in them are vehicles of an experience transcending the finiteness of human existence. In some ways, they are places that tell us a new sense of the sublime in small and limited fragments. Observing these first images of the series, I realised that this disappearance does not only involve places, things and a certain landscape model but, in a broader sense, it also involves a precise form of beauty. Together with the ice and the sense of desolation, we are losing elements of, let us say, a non-utilitarian beauty; that panic experience of things ignoring and transcending what humans artificially produce. What is decanted in my museums is the aesthetic condition that comes closest to the sense of the Absolute. For this reason, in the construction of these imaginary spaces, I did not start from the idea of a generic museum but I chose and reinterpreted art venues, especially contemporary art. Museums similar to the Hangar Bicocca in Milan, for instance, or to the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and other new spaces designed by various contemporary archi-stars.
You could say that MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS is a place of conservation not only for vanished objects but also – and mainly – for a particular kind of beauty. I could suggest that in those spaces you could visit museums of “the lost sense of Sublime”.

V/Is there a specific historical period or any artistic movement of the past that you look to in order to inspire yourself?
A.A .: All periods, without exception. Any age that has left signs of human interpretation interests me. Specifically, I am interested in the “signs” themselves, in their intrinsic and extrinsic value.
Starting from 40.000 years ago till now, the invention of art (or representation) has been one of the most surprising and terrifying innovations our species has developed. Furthermore, the intricate debate that tries to solve the delicate enigma – if art was the product of a linguistic development or if, instead, it is a genetic and intrinsic inclination of our species, which leaves aside /or comes before/ every subsequent linguistic superstructure – takes me a lot. In such a panorama, of course, there are chapters striking me more and others less. I am thinking about, for example, the Roman portraiture and the Egyptian portraits of the Ptolemaic era, which are perhaps the first and most disconcerting sign of modernity in our history. Another example might be the introduction of an early metaphysics that I found in the “Still Life” genre of the seventeenth century. To continue, I am thinking about Light Art that I see as an extreme offshoot of an investigation into the territory of the Sublime … and the Cinema, why not!?… And an infinity of other “moments” that escape me now but which would be interesting to mention. Each of these “revelations” has something to tell to me.

VI/What is your opinion about the Contemporary Art panorama? Is there something about it that you really appreciate? Is there something about it that you dislike?
A.A.: Just a couple of days ago, during a dinner I was invited to, it happened to listen to an Italian art dealer, a former gallery owner who worked in the years between the 1990s and the early 2000s.
While speaking, he expressed his opinion regarding the situation of international contemporary art. His statement seemed to me lucid and absolutely corresponding to the reality of recent years. I will bring it back to you as I remember it, trying to be as faithful as possible to his own words: “In the last 30 years art has slipped into a dangerous misunderstanding, playing a game that damages itself as art. Slowly it was filled with operators who replaced the intrinsic value of the artwork with values and market methods borrowed from other sectors:
finance, international stock exchanges and fashion. The transformation of art is now definitively accomplished and stabilised. From a platform for research and production of cultural data, art has become a brand subjected to financial operations whose value is also
dictated, above all, by the market circuit in which the artist is positioned. These processes define the quality and destiny of the work in the short-medium term. The majority of gallery owners, dealers and curators have accepted and share this misconception. Nothing is
asked to an artist any more, the assignment of this fictitious value is taken for granted, paying attention to artists and works that would have been ignored in different historical moments. This scheme mainly applies to the multinationals of art and to artists with a globalised circuit. The painful thing is to see that even the small-scale and low-impact galleries try to imitate these models, working badly and with increasing difficulty. These smaller “containers” have completely abandoned the idea of choosing alternative options
and other proposal processes. Over time, the “old” figures, historical gallery owners and the theorists of the past are replaced by operators who do not know the value of the “goods” they are handling, convinced that the content of the work is the major adherence
to this new superstructure. The new gallery owners are rarely convinced that the work of an artist should be proposed with dedication and constantly over time, working on the intrinsic value of the every single work and on the entire research of an artist. For this reason we continuously see a profusion of weak proposals that remain no more than 2 seasons, or maybe 3, and that are replaced by new equally weak figures very fast (…)” Well, more or less this is what I remember.
About the second question, it is easy, I like those works that move some emotion into myself. I do not like those works that smell of emptiness … and also contemporary mannerism.

VII/You work a lot with video-installations as well. What do you usually show in video-installations that you cannot do in your meta-photography? What is the advantage of video-installations comparing to your fixed meta-photography?
A.A.: Time, mainly, and the changing of images in a given period of time. In general, I try to establish a hypnotic relationship between the spectator and the video work. I like the idea that in that absolute elsewhere that my video installations build or represent, the observer loses contact with the world out there and finds himself in contact with the deepest self. Over the duration of the work, I hope this hypothetical observer could feel the taste of an unknown emotion slowly distilling every single drop. I hope that the ability to analyse what it has been observed comes later.
I consider the relationship between the public and the work of art as a bond of thin threads that bind the individual to the terminal of the work itself. These filaments carry information and impulses from the work to the senses and vice versa. The result of this connection (when it is established in the right terms) is the resonance between the mind and the source, or between the soul and the work, choose the image you prefer by yourself.
Video installations, in my opinion, have the ability to generate more links than a static image. Music, movement and the light that the work radiates, involving more sense organs, helping to multiply this kind of bonds. The video is a more tenacious persuader than the two-dimensional
image. I could summarise saying that this kind of work is nothing but multipliers of senses and meaning.

VIII/Nature is a central point of your artworks. In each of your series you approach nature with a very different perspective. How does nature keep inspiring you in so many different ways?
A.A .: The references to Nature you can find in my works come from two different reasons. Nature is my “absolute elsewhere”; it is this way as much in my private life as in my intellectual life. It represents one of the two categories of existence that I have experienced throughout my life. The second reason is that Nature is the “Great Absent” of our Age. Despite the vast clamour of the last period, at the international level, caused by the topic of climate change and the figure of Greta Thunberg in international summits (which often end in nothing), I continue to have the impression that Nature, in the panorama of our priorities, is in the background. Regarding this issue, I perceive a considerable distance between the international agenda, which continually puts on the table the protection of the natural environment, and the common feeling of the majority of the people, at least in Italy. I see nature as the guest who remained locked outside the door.
Furthermore, you have to consider that, in my work, the processes of image construction and my references derive, for the most part, from the field of science. Science has always represented the terrain of investigation on “things of nature” from the time of De Rerum Natura till now. Whether investigating the health of forests or oceans, or exploring the depth and origin of the universe, or the conformation and phenomena of particles in the infinitely small, each of these investigations leads to a more general look at “Things of nature”.
Nature, even if we are always willing to forget it, is the set of phenomena and mechanisms expressing the entire existence and making possible the existence in a broad sense. To be fussy, I replace the word Nature with the word World.
At the end, this is what interests me.
Moreover, I am interested in how we look at the world in its expressions, how we perceive it and, finally, how we are able to represent it through objective data but also through the “ghosts” of the perception we invent every day. The measure of reality is my ultimate investigation term and nature is an important figure in this scenario.

HIDDEN

a text on Aqua Aura by Alessandro Trabucco

Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible.
Paul Klee

Written by the great Swiss artist Paul Klee, one of the most prominent figures in the most revolutionary decade of the 20th Century, this meaningful statement is taken from Creative Confession, a short essay published almost a century ago, and is emblematic of a historical period of extraordinary and unrepeatable creative ferment.
These few years were characterised by enormous upheavals in all fields of human creativity, from painting to musical research (consider, for example, the astounding effect that Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ had on the audiences at its first performance in 1913, or the innovative theories of Schonberg’s dodecaphony, just a few years later) and the precocious language innovations involving a basically still young artistic field such as that of photography and put into practice by bold experimenters including Man Ray, Christian Schad and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.

This timeless phrase applies perfectly and especially to photography which, ever since its birth in around the mid 19th Century, has always been accused of being too closely identified with a servile duplication of reality.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, however, this prejudice was repudiated by the innovative capacity of the above mentioned artists (who cannot strictly be defined as pure photographers), and subsequently, in the last twenty years of the same century, with the technological development of digital photography, by which such accusations were once and for all rendered groundless.

When we look at a photograph now, it is no longer necessarily true that what we are seeing actually exists or has existed in reality or another time. In other words, photography no longer fulfils the task of objectively documenting a place or an event.
Photographic composition, in which it is possible, nevertheless, to recognise a cross-section of outer reality and
not merely the shadow or brilliant silhouette of a real object directly fixed by the artist onto emulsified paper in the darkroom (e.g. Man Ray’s rayograms, a technique that bypassed the stage of shooting the image onto light-sensitive film), is visually independent from that which it expresses. In other words, it “does not reproduce the visible, but it makes visible” an image that previously only existed in the mind of its creator.
And this is precisely what happens with the Aqua Aura images – icy landscapes, white deserts, desolate lands deprived of any living thing (human, animal or vegetable) or, in some cases, characterised by merely metaphorical presences (represented by an object or a remnant of manual activity), animated by an existence of their own, a ‘real’ inner life of their own. This presence in the world, however, is the fruit of an invention of the mind, an actual manipulation that first takes place in the unfathomable realm of the human imagination and is then ‘physically’ elaborated in the electronic virtuality of the digital artificial world.

The images, therefore, originate from a series of suggestions provoked by external reality, the actual procedure followed by Aqua Aura and, initially, the established procedure of landscape photography, which searches the globe far and wide in pursuit of a personal interpretation of the natural spectacle before our eyes, realising an indefinite (i.e. unquantifiable) number of shots. In the work of Aqua Aura these shots subsequently undergo considerable changes; a careful selection of the images leads to the creation of real visual hybrids, individual representations assembled on the computer and composed of parts taken from different shots to form a brand new and, above all, inexistent reality.
This is exactly what Paul Klee affirms: to “make it visible” that which previously did “not exist” and that now can finally take shape thanks to the demiurgical power of the artist, who infuses vital energy into a new ‘creature’ by igniting its own inner creative spark.
The exhibition, which covers two floors of the gallery (ground and basement), is arranged in a sequence designed
to accompany the visitor in the discovery of the evocative landscapes created by Aqua Aura, following an itinerary that reveals one by one the characteristic features of each image, and especially the overall atmospheres evoked by them.
The sensation of the sublime, which inspires the vision of the glacial environments with their stark contrasts of bril- liant white and pitch black, and the vapours that recall distant places in space and time, natural events that charm the gaze of the viewer and lead it into silent, still, romantic visions.
The attention is then further captivated by the presence of a modular display element that is apparently unrelated to the context, which introduces, especially with regard to the works exhibited on the basement floor, a destabilising and alternative aspect in an exclusively static and contemplative vision.

Aqua Aura uses this special object to create a ‘voyeuristic’ setting, compelling the viewer to come into closer con- tact with the individual images by hanging in front of them a sparkling red string curtain that prevents an easy and full view – a concealing action which has the precise purpose of establishing a sort of visual intimacy, a close, perso- nal encounter, with the viewer.

The dreamlike aspect that characterises these photographs is a clear, tangible sign of the formal genesis that takes place mentally; to landscapes with a romantic atmosphere the artist adds architectural elements or alienating pre- sences that considerably increase the effect of visual disorientation.