91mQ
Art project space
The 6th February 2010 from 7pm
AREAL ATLAS – Inner world map
Ugo Locatelli
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”. William Blake
Reality is much more uncertain than it appears. The ways in which human beings perceive the reality, on the basis of their own culture and experience, are countless.
Whether as adjective or as substantive, the Italian term Areale refers to the nature or the identity of an area; for the author, it becomes an approach that suggests a "suspended reality" – i.e. a blurred area between the real and the unreal – and that considers the appearance as "the surface of profundity".
Areal represents an area of sensible indeterminateness, a fluid filigree, where the sense of possibility may be seen – the possibility that forms and signs of reality different from the apparent one may unveil our way of looking at things.
Areal Atlas is a dynamic network constituted of relations between visual-verbal texts and soundtracks. It is an ongoing cartography, in which each and every observation generates a new visual experience as well as an extension of "the map of the inner world": a snapshot among the unlimited possible ones.
Areal Atlas challenges the traditional view of map-making in which the geological symbols are distinguished from other types of cartographic symbols, such as the symbols of the built environment. Atlante Areale proposes a "multi-place", a hypertext that interacts with the emotions and cognitions of the observer, which are different from person to person, just like fingerprints. Likewise, the relationships and resonances that can be generated are unlimited, and thus each reader, through his/her own way of looking at and interpreting, becomes a coauthor.
The tables are not static. On the contrary, they have a sensitive nature: like mobile islands in our inner stream. The charts are complemented by critical contributions and a "glossary", and resemble ancient maps: a device for reading and making sense of the world, used by explorers to discover uncharted places or to identify new characteristics of a known location.
The atlas is divided up into 7 thematic areas, which include 35 charts with a modular structure. The 7 themes are: light, sound, form, route, tree, stone and bridge.
In the Atlante areale, each and every image may begin to resonate with the others and move in any direction, and in so doing, broadening one's view: exerting a continuous and reciprocal influence. Whichever frame of a chart is potentially the centre of another chart.
Thus, the atlas becomes a fluid geography of "thought-forms", where each frame is a sort of mental sprout: a generative process that can never be considered final or conclusive.
The visual elements of the atlas come from different sources and have specific characteristics: photographs personally taken by the author, commissioned photographs or photographs selected from archives of other artists/photographers as well as meta-photographs, i.e. drawings based on mental images that visualizes an idea (a figurative thinking) of something which is not or was not – photographable.
The photographic language is not used in order to provide an account of the observable world, but as a tool for reflection on, and awareness of, our explorative view as well as an operative method to deconstruct the subject and to get in touch with our optical unconscious.
Atlante Areale can be presented in different ways depending on the available context, specific objectives and resources: automatic video-projection or commented projection, touch screen, interactive media, exhibition of charts and/or frames.