the classroom #6
Linda Fregni Nagler
Photo Courtesy: Triennale Milano
Linda Fregni Nagler (Stockolm, 1976), Italian artist known for her photographic work, creates a new performance for Teatro dell’Arte on the occasion of her project for the classroom.
The work consists in a full day at Teatro dell’Arte – Triennale Milano where the artist is shaping an open classroom and a performance of her series titled Things that Death Cannot Destroy, which began in 2009 and is still ongoing. It’s a double projection of antique glasses for magic lanterns coming from the archive of the artist (composed of about three thousand six hundred specimens, collected from 2005 and divided into categories and genres that elude any method of scientific archiving).
CLASS
THINGS THAT DEATH CANNOT DESTROY
Teatro dell’arte, Triennale Milano
Within the classroom’s sixth project, Linda Fregni Nagler (Stockholm, 1976), an Italian artist was invited to play an open classroom – dedicated to the memory of Massimo Buffetti, collector and friend of the artists – involving a class of students and public interested in the subject.
The artist transforms the stage of the Theater of the Arts into a classroom and invites all of them to go inside the stage machine to watch the general rehearsals of the performance in which he worked for the project. The open lesson continues with the artist’s sharing of a personal vision of the history of photography, starting from what most influenced her in the construction of the personal artistic path.
PERFORMANCE
THINGS THAT DEATH CANNOT DESTROY
Teatro dell’arte, Triennale Milano
Things That Death Cannot Destroy is the overall title of an ongoing research, which began exactly ten years ago, which on this occasion reaches its ninth episode and confirms the appropriateness of the images and their manipulation, the archive, the ambiguity and the mechanisms of vision, editing, the conceptual nature of the photographic medium are the vocabulary of Linda Fregni Nagler’s constantly evolving work.
During the night, the artist actually presents sequences of images from her private archive, conceived as a stream of visual associations. While two performers manually change the slides in the projectors, a voice reads out the original captions, adding to the performative dimension of the process.
The flow of visual pairings suggests different interpretive perspectives: an anthropology lecture, a historical documentary, a surreal fictional story, a reflection on the nature of photography itself.
The title of the work indicates sequences of images, different each time the performance takes place, conceived as a continuous flow of visual associations. Each image feeds on the previous one and conditions the next one, visually unfolding a sort of cadavre exquis.
Ten years after its debut, thanks to FOG Triennale Milano Performing Arts, for the first time an Italian institution welcomes this new performance, already staged, among other places, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and at the Innsbruck Biennale. On stage, the artist and an assistant alternate the images in the chassis of the magic lanterns, while a male voice reads the captions. The photographs have different geographical origins and were designed for different purposes. Some have descriptions, while others do not retain any information, but none have been produced with the intention of creating a work of art. It is in this sense that they take on new life within the project, while remaining what they are: images to look at. The photographic material thus shown raises questions on the laying of the human figure, on social categorizations, censorship and copyright, juxtaposing and combining images to produce new meanings.
Thanks to this archive, what becomes legible is not History, but the look of an artist on the many pieces of a mosaic combined with infinite variations.
The documentary video of performance has been produced thanks to contribution fo ACACIA.
The project has been produced by FOG – Triennale Milano Performing Arts and by Banca Generali with the support of Monica De Cardenas galleria, Vistamare – Vistamare studio, CAP – Contemporary Art projects. The Linda’s classroom has been produced with the collaboration of Buffetti’s family.
