Sandberg Instituut Graduation Show 2022Work In Progress
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Studio for Immediate Spaces
Stefania Rigoni+
biography
Stefania Rigoni (1994) is a spatial and visual practitioner. Her research interests usually fall into the material and immaterial traces left by the frictions and conflicts disrupting our time, it being the past, the present or the future. The formal outcomes vary constantly, and are tailored for the need of each project: from publications and visual researches, to performances and installations.
According to Mr. Ips
A few months ago, I stumbled upon a picture that caught my attention. It’s a picture taken in the mid 20s of the last century, in a valley close to my hometown in the northeastern mountains of Italy. It shows a phase in the process of reforestation undertaken after the devastation left by WWI: a proud man stands, in a field covered by melting snow, in front of a haystack. All around him and up until the background, straight rows of tiny spruce plants have recently been planted. Those trees could now be a thick and dense forest of spruce, but they could also be among the hundreds of thousands of plants fallen after the passage of Storm Vaia, at the end of 2018. In one night, an exceptionally strong wind wiped to the ground whole forests made particularly fragile precisely from the way in which they were planted many decades prior. The close proximity, in straight ordered lines, of the same species of trees, planted in the same moment, has proven a fatal choice. The event has been emotionally and economically shocking: entire landscapes have been drastically modified, bearing the loss of an immense amount of timber and the need for a (still nowadays) non-stop employment of labour and resources to restore the damaged areas. The urgency of a constant effort to clean up comes from the need to contain the ultimate fragility that the monocultural forestation policy of the XXth century carries: parasites. The Ips Typographus is a beetle of 5 mm that attacks dying Spruces, but in extraordinary conditions it can attack also healthy plants. With the amount of specimens fallen four years ago, the Ips Typographus has thrived to the point of now being the primary danger to the stability of the ecosystem of my hometown’s forests. I started being fascinated (not in a positive or negative sort of judgment) by the clash of temporal, spatial and proportional scales suddenly collapsing onto one another and revealing themselves in the traces left by both the wind and the insects. Cary Wolfe and Maria Whiteman have also been stricken by a similar situation. In an article called “Landscape and Inscription” they refer to the devastating effects of a parasite decimating the woods of Texas, and frame their interest with words that match my thoughts. “…the fallen pines of the Front Range are traces of something both there and not there, the graphic materialisation and registration of factors and forces at scales both above and beneath the domesticating world of the human who looks at nature and composes a landscape. For us, this asymmetry and asynchronicity of scales in both time and space are captured in the difference between the lowly mountain pine beetle, at a mere five millimetres long, and the vastness of the landscapes—entire mountain ranges, in fact—altered by its presence under quite ecologically and historically specific conditions.” The factors and forces referred to in the article can also be called hyperobjects, those objects “…that “are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” and thus in a fundamental sense defy thought—certainly representational thought.” as argued in the same article by Wolfe and Whiteman, citing in this passage their colleague Timothy Morton. The traces left by hyperobjects are therefore one of the only ways that allow us to perceive the vastness and the impacts of their existence in our life as well as in the life of other species, revealing an underlying and inescapable interconnectedness of fates. However, what is inescapable is also the way in which as humans we perceive and react. Our bodies and the means we use to organise our lives can hardly be sublimated and overcome, and are the only tools we have to relate to others. I therefore started to look at what these relational tools are and what is their impact–for good or for bad. I came back to look at the picture from the 20s. Grids and straight lines are among the most used spatial arrangements in the history of humankind. Used to separate space evenly, its employment allows also the representation of said space thanks to its scalability properties; that’s how maps are born. Fragmenting materiality in equal quantities allows for a better management of complexity, but it’s at times a dysfunctional way to relate to space and others. My project is a quest on the perception alterations we impose but also experience. Through the means of reproduction techniques of scales and grids I’m trying to link our understanding of the world in relation to the one of a much tinier individual, in the cosmos we both inhabit.
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