DEATHSCAPES: HISTORIES OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES
Filipe Figueiredo e Cosimo Chiarelli apresentam uma comunicação na 7th International Conference of Photography and Theory, em Nicosia, com o titulo:
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE PERFORMANCE OF THE ABSENCE
Abstract:
Photography has progressively integrated theatre and performative practices through lecture-performances, projected photographs, devices on stage or visual dramaturgies dealing with personal or collective traumas, wars and conflicts. That is the case, for instance, with the work of Walid Raad/Atlas Group, straddling archive, exhibition, and performance.
Since the potential of photography lies in its ontological connection with reality, the strategic introduction of photographic images on stage results in a powerful combination between the real world and fiction, creating an engaging dramaturgy through the accumulation of multilayered meanings.
On the other hand, the performative presentation of photographic images contributes to reinforce these meanings at a thicker level for photography itself through the intrinsic capacity of performance to vivify and make present the absence of reality. In doing so, it reactivates and amplifies the photographic capacity to mobilize the audience reaction, following Azoulay’s idea of civil contract.
On stage, this is achieved through various modalities like physical contact and haptic manipulation of images, reuse and re-enactment of archival materials, or creation of fictional narratives, turning the absence of the real in the image into the presence of the gesture. On this occasion, these modalities are illustrated by contemporary Portuguese artists like Joana Craveiro, Rita Neves, and Tânia Dinis, who work at the intersection of photography and performance. In all these cases, by encountering with performance, photography transcends its flat, two-dimensional nature, gaining a rich and meaningful depth and its own specific performativity, which Rebecca Schneider has termed ‘photographicality’.
