Academic Collaborations

Difficult Intimacy: Photographic Immersions in Benedetta Panisson’s Excess Island
by Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián (Durham University, UK)

No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.

Eve Sedgwick

Excess Island culminates a decade-long investigation into sensory poiesis and photographic emotiveness that locates Western ways of seeing islands in what Eve Sedgwick, quoting Melanie Klein, calls “the reparative reading position.” The photographs that Panisson exhibits at OPR Gallery in Milan from September 2021 document acts of co-constitutive creation and recognition between two modern protagonists: the voluble, sexual, camera-wielding human, and the sublime, sentient, refractive, and potentially hostile biosphere. In this imaginary and photographed relation, who makes what and who constitutes whom? Panisson’s photographs display a thorough interrogation of the sensorium that lies beyond the common traveler’s sentimental reach because solitude and slow immersion are not usually included in the package holiday. Excess Island suspends the impetus to commodify environmental objects and demonstrates a commitment to sense and coexist on the margins of acceleration and consumerism.

These are almost invariably diurnal photographs that privilege contrast, shade, and subtle transitional moods. They are accented by an emotive colour palette that ranges from mineral (azurite and sulphur), to twilight and dawn (pale pink and light blue), to analog silvers and deep blacks. They include variations on light and airiness, glimpses of intense diurnal immersion, and occasional instances of overexposure. They dwell on the intimacy of the open air, the watchful perambulation of a found vista, and those scenes that fit photographic convention initially, but only to question it by amplifying the supreme importance of acts of passing – the barely perceptible passing of day, bird, child, cloud or wave. Scale is transported onto the realms of symbols and archetypes, but quickly re-figured as metaphoric, erotically-charged body-parts. And these parts of the traveler’s cultural baggage are the excessive, sentient, pulsating erotogenic zones that we carry and project onto the island. Panisson’s photographs chart and magnify the personal discovery of these expanding, folding, receding island regions. Yet they do not transact in exoticism, but participate in a reparative sense of self and place. Their reach is at once is island-bound and planetary.

The photographic sequences of Excess Island express a determination to transcend the cultural construction of natural light through photographic processes. They represent an investigation into primordial freedom, an art of immersion that questions the atmospheric conditions of instant, fleeting, and slow intimate intercourse in elemental spacetime. Waves swell, the sea rises and can be alluring and playful, or imposing on its littoral domains, and often exhilarating in its iodized moods of gentle and intention-less rhythms. Panisson’s photographs capture these elemental moods firmly and intuitively, not by extracting or leading, but by letting go of contextual detail so the pleasures and risks of cross-reflection can project a memorable encounter. These images examine how fleeting instances of unrecoverable time can be expanded through an excess of sensory discharges that structures the picture in the moment of capture.

These images are more experimental and exploratory than their apparent simplicity suggests. We will find no trace of the baroque articulations of the embattled senses that constitute the photographic asthetics of windsurfing, paragliding, or mountaineering. There is no amorous battle or epic struggle against the elements, but a placid pressure that measures the variable intensities of intimacy and detachment and rejects the relentless politics of metropolitan perspectivism that, as T. J. Demos argues, would explain the Anthropocene without attention to colonial, racist and gender violence, and capitalist exploitation. These are intimate portraits or sketches of un-representable experience that make us feel at ease with nude and vulnerable panoramas of the constructed seascape and islandscape. If we linger and listen, we understand that the sea, earth, and sky are no longer pure, except in our fantasies of an eternally discoverable planet. In Excess Island, the sea, earth, and sky bear the memory of future catastrophes.

These photographs narrate an expansive intimacy. The island assists the photographer in framing intimate atmospheres. But what are the insular areas of sensory pleasure in this decaying assemblage, in this frayed materiality? The sequences of this imaginary conversation expand under the deep blue skies, near the raucous waves, and in botanical and geological excursions that annotate the receding sounds of nature. A labour of intimate attention to the evidence of planetary turmoil commences in these echoing images, and we hear a multitude of palpitating orifices. Like our erotogenic mouths, the range of orifices that structure Excess Island like a reparative scaffolding are perceptive zones: generous receptacles, bearers of affective potential, emanators and receptors of libidinal relation. In Excess Island, the planetary environments onto which humans and other species project our bodily openings do not display a singular body, but a plethora of rhythmic cycles, events, and impending environmental transformations that pulsate like shoals of mouths and evoke the infant proto-languages that irrigate our sensory capacities.

The spectator will wonder if these images might not be photographic souvenirs, exotic images of loss and nostalgia. Or are they samples of a fast-disappearing modern imagination of the living planet? Svetlana Boym wrote tirelessly about displacement, exile, and nostalga. As we enter the emotional textures of pandemic, post-pandemic, and anticipatory “normality,” Boym’s reflections resonate uncannily with Panisson’s exhibition: “The illusion of complete belonging has been shattered. Yet, one discovers that there is still a lot to share. The foreign backdrop, the memory of past losses and recognition of transience do not obscure the shock of intimacy, but rather heighten the pleasure and intensity of surprise” (255). The uncompromising immediacy of Excess Island collapses and splinters across the multiple connective streams of photographic recognition, or what Boym identifies so perceptively as the shock of intimacy.

Glenn A. Albrecht imagines a nostalgia that struggles to find a sense of direction. Citing Albert Camus, he writes that ‘when the limits of one’s world, its laws and order, are destroyed by forces beyond one’s control, then home becomes not only toxic, it becomes “nostalgia without aim”.’ He explains: ‘I define “solastalgia” as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place’ (34, 38). If Excess Island recovers a sense of belonging through an unesy identification with the “home” of analog photography, do we not discern in all these images a nostalgia for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or for the adventurous, twenty-decade-long process of photographic reproducibility? Watching some of these photographs, we remember that pre-digital world nostalgically, like a crumbling yet coherent shelter, like a now derelict common home.

The excess island interferes with the prescribed visualities of island exoticisms. Photographic prosopopoeia channels island voices, exertions, moods, and atmospheres. Island poses and eroticised environments in turn ventriloquize the capricious Planet that stares back at us with passionate indifference. In this relational interplay, we are all persons and we all perform as characters – the heroic seagull, the gathering storm, and the shoaling fish. Yet it is not the cast of characters that matters most, but the fact that all these photographs characterize us as spectators and co-participants in photographic nostalgia. These images capture and liberate experiences that lie outside exploitative regimes of production, reproduction, and dissemination: the “the compulsion of production” that Byung-Chul Han identifies as an overriding pathology of our neoliberal condition. Panisson’s sensory islandscapes demand our participation in the visionary images and soundscapes of an un-productive, queer, and reparative future of intimate relation.

There is no contemplative inaction in these photograhs, but an immersive and reparative longing (a longing for acts of “reparative reading” and “reparative knowing” in Sedgwick’s sense) to participate in the variable moods of the planet. Nor is there an obvious contrast, so common in contemporary island visualities, between packaged leisure and industrial extraction, the otium and negotium of tourist exploitation. These photographs wander to the limits of the gathering clouds, weather disturbances, atmospheric phenomena, meteora. They form sensory interstices, folds, and perspectives that long for undisturbed encounters with island lives that by turns fly, erupt, recede, and deflect interpelation. Panisson’s images reflect on our contemporary appetite for expansive action, acting, re-enactment and circulation. But they reduce the traveler’s activities to a minimum, concentrating instead on an immersive, reparative labour of intimacy and hope.

 Excess Island exposes the telescopic perspectivism that so often occludes island specificities in visual and audiovisual representation to indulge travelers, tourists, spectators, and customers in the service areas of globalized “island environments” – those island pastiches that know neither irony nor camp. In this particular strategy, Panisson belongs to a diverse family of contemporary visual artists who simultaneously mistrust and reimage earth, water, and islandscapes: Carmela García, Laura Huertas, Torbjørn Rødland, Wolfgang Tillmans, among others. As island environments grow increasingly constrained by an aggressive material and audiovisual occlusion, Panisson’s photographs demand our commitment to creative resistance and resposible action for the sake of multiple forms of life, personae, and the kinds of sensuous plesures that can expand new affective and conceptual passages.

What are these affective and conceptual passages? They are sequences of pores, mouths, anuses, nostrils, eyes, urethras, vaginas, and erotogenic minds like shoals of fish and thickets of palmtrees. We approach these photographs as images of future immersion in the liveable, loveable, fearful, vulnearable Earth. The camera is already there, and Benedetta Panisson’s Excess Island demonstrates this with political urgency, aesthetic fluency, and a contagious and reparative optimism.

References

Glenn A. Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019, p. 34, 38.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 255.
J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, Berlin: Stenberg, 2017.
Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, trans. Daniel Steuer, Cambridge, UK: Polity,   2020, p. 1-15.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 150-1, 149.

https://oprgallery.it/excess-island/

PhD Research at Durham University, UK. 2020-ongoing. Sexual Exorbitance in Island Environments. Visual Displays of Intimacy in Human and Interspecies Sexualities

Happy and honored to announce my new project, a PhD Research at Durham University, UK. "Sexual Exorbitance in Island Environments. Visual Displays of Intimacy in Human and Interspecies Sexualities". An academic research that is an art practice, and vice versa.

A dream coming true thanks to my wonderful supervisors, Prof. Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián and Prof. Marc Schachter, to Durham University, and to our outstanding official media partner, PHROOM. https://phroommagazine.com/hydrophilia/

Islands and seas, human and animal sexual exorbitant displays, gender and queer studies, decolonial studies, ocean environment studies, and art will make my next three years a liquid surprise.

The Structure of Revenge | curated by Theatrum Mundi and Adam Kaasa, Aristide Antonas, Yoke Sum Wong, Christos Carras | Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens | 2016

Structures of Feelings is part of a series of international meetings based on Raymond Williams’ classic essay on materiality and feeling. For this meeting in Athens, revenge and its entangled emotions forms the central theme in the spaces of the contemporary city. This gathering brings together theoreticians and practitioners: writers, directors, philosophers, academics, artists, architects and political thinkers.
The contemporary city can be described as a form of life where the infrastructure operates as an unforeseen factor in scale and strength; comparing it to analogous constructions of the past. In our internet age, humans reside within this infrastructure. The infrastructure makes sharing possible, supports human activities and also extends and prolongs human time, driving and regulating its rhythms, demanding adaptation and compliance to the norm. The everyday of modernity supports the creation of "a space without revenge"…

http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1518/

Come to Venice at Annual Conference Città, cittadini, conflitti. Il diritto alla prova della dimensione urbana | Milano-Bicocca University | School of Law | 2017

Il tema Città, cittadini e conflitti consente di esaminare un ampio ventaglio di problematiche connesse all'idea della "città che cambia", intesa come un corpo vivo in continua mutazione che non si lascia facilmente guidare nel suo sviluppo secondo la logica di una pianificazione imposta dall'alto per mezzo di regole politiche, economiche, sociali e giuridiche.
Le sollecitazioni che provengono quotidianamente dalla realtà - si pensi a titolo di esempio al dibattito sullo ius soli e sugli accresciuti poteri di ordinanza dei sindaci - evidenziano la necessità di ripensare il rapporto tra la città come spazio architettonico, urbanistico, paesaggistico e come aggregato di persone (singoli cittadini, gruppi, istituzioni).
I decisori politici devono saper gestire quotidianamente una realtà urbana che si fonda su contraddizioni e conflitti che possono scaturire da fenomeni come - ad esempio - l'immigrazione, la globalizzazione economica, il progresso tecnologico. E' in tale contesto che emergono nuove modalità del vivere insieme, dell'essere appunto cittadini, sotto i profili contrapposti dialogo-non dialogo, inclusione-esclusione, uguaglianze-diseguaglianze, socialità-estraniamento, ecc.
Il tema proposto si presta ad essere esaminato in un'ottica multidisciplinare e comparatistica, coinvolgendo trasversalmente diversi settori del diritto e materie quali, la storia e la filosofia, la criminologia, l'architettura e l'urbanistica, la sociologia e la demografia.

https://www.unimib.it/eventi/citt%C3%A0-cittadini-conflitti-diritto-alla-prova-della-dimensione-urbana

Mediolanum Underground at "Bibe Vivas", curated by Prof. Barbara Biscotti in collaboration with Milano-Bicocca University | Civico Museo Archeologico di Milano | 2015

An ongiong project between a Roman Law Professor and a visual artist, intersecting the discipline of the scientific reaserch with the undiscipline of the art practice, observing the subtle form of a knowledge.
A walk around Milano with a Roman Law Professor looking for ancient Roman ruins among subways, parking lots, apartment blocks. (about 15 photos series, all from film, variable dimension, 2015). The project preview was presented at Civico Museo Archeologico di Milano. Partecipating Professors: Mariavittoria Antico Gallina, archeologist, Universita’ Cattolica di Milano; Barbara Biscotti, Roman Law Historian, Universita’ di Milano-Bicocca; Filippo Maria Gambari, Superintendent of Archeology of the Lombardy Region; Gianfranco Valle, geologist and geoarcheologist.

Technical details
Mediolanum Underground | B/W film photographic series, 30 images.

Come to Venice at Structures of Feelings | Royal College of Art | curated by Adam Kaasa and Yoke Sum Wong | 2015

The title of this meeting is inspired by Raymond William’s Structures of Feeling essay (1977) in which we explore “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange.” It is this embryonic phase that we give attention to in the experiencing of architecture as immaterial and material and as we navigate its configurations – negotiating towards the affective consciousness of spatial form/s that is at once social and personal – emergent and emerging – in an ‘interrelating continuity’.
How do spatial forms contribute to, as Susan Lepselter writes, an ethnography of emergent feeling? How do we feel architecture and world it – taking worlding as a way of apprehension and comprehension – giving it a structure that we make (non)sense of. The bridging of thought and feeling, the sensations that we encounter in built environments – despair, happiness, joy, fear, dread, hope, disgust nostalgic, warmth and so on – are often evoked instantaneously before we begin to stitch the narratives together or to grasp why we are attuned to the spaces the way we do. Another way of framing it is through Kathleen Stewart’s ‘atmospheric attunements’ which “attend to the quickening of nascent forms, marking their significance in sounds and sights and the feel of something’s touch or something penetrating…[turning] a potentiality into a threshold to the real.”

https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/structures-feelings/

Come to Venice | Winner at The Istituto Veneto’s International Journalism Prize for Venice | 2014

The Prize will reward a press article or a video report on Venice that stands out for its acute understanding of the multifaceted social, economic, natural or artistic aspects of the Venetian situation.

The Prize (€. 5,000) will be presented by a Committee to be appointed by the Istituto Veneto’s Governing Board. The Judging Committee for the 2013 edition of the Prize will include the Institute’s Governing Board and the Members Lady Frances Clarke, Leopoldo Mazzarolli, Antonio Paolucci, Pierre Rosenberg, Wolfgang Wolters and Alvise Zorzi.

The emeritus Chancellor of the Institute, Sandro Franchini, is appointed Secretary of the Committee.

Judging Committee Motivation:
The movie Come to Venice by Benedetta Panisson transcends the documentary level by presenting a sort of 'intimate diary' where some Venetians, whose faces are hidden, tell why they live in Venice, what is missing, what is essential, what they love and what they hate in this city. The voices, alive and sincere, accompanied by the dramatic sound of the sirens of the high tide, become 'collective voices', the expression of a common feeling. The reasons to love Venice and to resist you, despite the hardships, and the final sound of the bells of St. Mark, free your heart from anguish. Originality of setting, excellent quality of filming and editing make this film worthy of the Istituto Veneto per Venezia award

http://www.istitutoveneto.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/355

Come to Venice at Bozar | Palais des Beaux Arts, Bruxelles | Narratives for change: the united power of people, stories and technologies to induce change | Workshop organized by ECLT | 2014

The event is held under the High Patronage of the Italian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The workshop will analyze the role of narratives for public engagment at the nexus of science, ICT, and the Arts. The workshop will gather experts from different filds (S&T, policy and the Arts) to discuss ideas and share experiences in public engagement by use of the combined power of narratives, new technologies, and the Arts. The event is organized by EC funded program “Emergency by Design”. Artists, scientists, policy makers, as well as citizens rely on and construct nerratives when they produce artwork, theories, policies, or social movements. Such narratives become part of and forge an identity and are themselves transformed through their use. THe program “Emergency by Design” is setting up a digital platform that allows monitoring such transformations.

Come to Venice at Ca’ Foscari University | Designing a more sustainable Europe: stories for changes and innovation | Workshop organized by ECLT, INSITE, Ca’ Foscari, 2014

ECLT (European Centre for Living Technologies, Ca’ Foscari interuniversity research centre) investigates the living technologies: artefacts and processes (from nano-scale to social scale) that take form and act based on typical biological process: self-organization, adaption, development. Can an artistic vision and narration produce a sustainable change? Can it show its own story from a differnt point of view?

During the workshop Benedetta Panisson, together with a team of researchers anf project curator, Amerigo Nutolo, tlked about: the dark side of communication, the victim-executioner sadian mechanism, the deep victim point of view, comformism and bourgeoisie as impossiblity of a tragic feeling, the use of the high tide siren as general state of alarm, a community loosing its own sense of community.

http://www.insiteproject.org/event/designing-a-more-sustainable-europe-stories-for-change-and-innovation/

Come to Venice case study in a reaserch by Prof. Laura Burocco | Universidade do Rio de Janeiro | published in Concinnitas | Revista do Istituto de Artes da UERJ: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/concinnitas/article/view/21191/15273