Supporto per Immagine // Simona Luchian
Simona Luchian (1989) is an italian artist who live and work in Auckland, New Zeland.
Giangiacomo Cirla: We saw your work “Support for Image” exposed at MACRO (Roma) during the Talent Prize 2016, can you tell us something about the project?
Simona Luchian: The photograph “Support for Image” [#1] is part of an ongoing project which started in 2015, which consists of the construction of installations which are placed in specific sites, photographed and – in the end – destroyed. I believe that through photography it is possible to give new life and identity to the sculpture: it is placed in a specific site that is not only a background or context, but actually becomes essential to the identity of the final image. Indeed, the final shot captures and reveals a special relationship between the sculpture and the space in which it is situated – a kind of hypothetical parallel world. Without the photography it would be impossible to perceive that relationship and the world it reveals.
G: Why the choice to work both with sculpture and photography in a single work?
S: Photography has always been my principal medium, although I’m not a pure photographer. I visualize my practice as a system in which photography comes first, fast enough to capture insights from external reality but not deep enough to complete the entire mechanism; therefore, I need to be able to further model the image with other mediums, but this time working in direct contact with the materials. Undoubtedly, this stems from my desire to create things with my own hands – I have always enjoyed being in direct contact with objects. At the same time, I wouldn’t consider myself a sculptor, because I would never create sculptures to be exhibited. I’m a hybrid – photographer, sculptor yet neither one completely.
S: this project “Support for Image” is currently in progress. At the moment I am working on a new “New Zealand sequence” which will become part of the project. The title of the sequence is “Umbilical cords”: it consists of building installations using printed pictures and white cement cords that connect the pictures to each other. In this way the umbilical cords function like connecting supports which feed the images. The images that I have chosen are photos of ferns, an important symbol in New Zealand, and rich in many meanings.
