The newspaper beyond the invisible. Camilla Gurgone’s perspective

First name and surname: Camilla Gurgone

Place and year of birth: Lucca, 1997

Related galleries and social media links:

IG: www.instagram.com/camilla.gurgone

Website: www.camillagurgone.it

Viasaterna Gallery, Milan www.instagram.com/viasaterna

 

 

I think I began my career as an artist when I realised that reality takes shape through the eyes of the observer. I have always attached great importance to other people, to their thoughts and judgements, and for a long time I saw this as a weakness, because it meant constantly allowing myself to be influenced by perspectives that challenged my own.

During my first year at the Academy of Fine Arts, I realised that it was precisely this permeability that could become the space in which to develop my research. The gaze of the other ceased to be something I needed to defend myself against and became a tool for knowledge, through which to understand, challenge and construct meaning. Since then, I have sought to create works in which people are not mere spectators, but an active part of the process, contributing their own perspective to shape the work.

 

What interests me about an archive is not so much what it preserves, but rather what it makes visible. The choices that guide the collection, organisation and interrelationship of the materials transform a collection of documents into a particular interpretation of reality. Rather than seeking information, I try to observe these processes, because it is there that the meaning of what is preserved takes shape. In this sense, the archive does not merely preserve the past, but constructs narratives, attributes value to things and shapes the way we interpret them. A collection of traces thus ceases to be a mere compilation of materials and becomes a narrative capable of altering our perspective.

An example I find particularly significant, even if it appears out of context, is Orhan Pamuk’s "Museum of Innocence", where a work of fiction takes shape in the real world through a museum installation built around the novel. It is not the authenticity of the objects that makes it credible, but the way in which they are collected, linked together and woven into a narrative capable of transforming an imaginary story into a real experience.

 

This is probably the question I find hardest to answer, because I don’t really believe in lists of references. It seems to me that they say more about a person’s bookshelf than about their point of view. I prefer to think of my influences as a collection of interests that continue to engage with one another, even though they belong to irreconcilable worlds.

I am fascinated by anything that attempts to explain how our perceptions, emotions and behaviours are formed. That is why I read Erving Goffman, Eva Illouz, Bruno Latour and Hartmut Rosa, as well as authors such as Kate Crawford and scholars such as Lev Manovich, who help us understand the relationship between human beings, technologies and contemporary systems. Then there’s Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, because they’ve taught me to view objects, archives and collections as tools through which we construct our imaginations. In art, I could draw up a very long list of names. What the artists I return to most often have in common are those practices that bring together people, objects, images and contexts, shifting the focus from the artwork to the processes that generate it.

I also view phenomena that wouldn’t normally feature in a response of this sort with the same curiosity. I might watch a video on TikTok with the same interest as I read a neuroscience essay, or think of Pokémon as a sophisticated system for classifying, collecting and building affection. I now find it increasingly less useful to distinguish between high culture and pop culture: whilst Antonio Damasio provides me with tools to reflect on the relationship between emotion and rationality, a platform like TikTok allows me to observe how those emotions are amplified, shared and transformed into collective behaviour. Whilst Orhan Pamuk shows how a collection can make fiction real, a recommendation algorithm reveals how a sequence of images can shape tastes, desires and identities.

 

Everyday life becomes interesting precisely when it ceases to be invisible. There are gestures, objects and behaviours that we repeat every day without questioning them. When we observe them a little more closely, they begin to reveal a complexity that normally escapes us. It is at that moment that a sense of unease may arise, not because something monstrous emerges, but because we realise that what seemed natural is in fact the result of a series of conventions, relationships and systems that we had never noticed before.

 

At present, my research is focusing increasingly on the relationship between emotional experience and contemporary mediating devices. I am interested in understanding how we cope with moments of transformation, loss or vulnerability, and what tools we use to make sense of them. Whilst it was once primarily our closest relationships that fulfilled this function, today we are increasingly turning to digital platforms, forums or artificial intelligence systems as well.

I am exploring how AI is not merely used to obtain information, but becomes a space in which to ask intimate questions, come to terms with grief, seek comfort or bring order to one’s thoughts. I am not so much interested in asking whether this is right or wrong, as in understanding what it reveals about our present and how the places to which we entrust our questions, our vulnerabilities and our search for meaning are changing.

 

From my point of view, it is a space where we can observe reality from a different perspective, setting aside for a moment what we take for granted. It has the potential to reveal relationships, behaviours and dynamics that permeate our daily lives but which often remain invisible precisely because we have become accustomed to their presence. Like a lens that adds nothing to reality but magnifies certain details, allowing us to linger on things we normally pass by without noticing. Sometimes, all it takes is a slight shift in our gaze for something familiar to reveal a complexity that had previously escaped us.

 

Reclaiming time and care (: Perhaps the question is not why I choose fragile materials, but why we find it increasingly difficult to take care of things that can break.

 

I don’t have a particularly rigid routine. I start the day without having breakfast – a questionable choice, I know. On my way to the underground, I like to peek at the objects left on the dashboards and in the glove compartments of parked cars. Then my days alternate between periods of research, reading, writing and design, and more practical phases of experimentation in the studio. I also make room for what happens outside my artistic work, because many insights arise from observing everyday situations, conversations or minor details. It’s vital that I remember to complete my daily lesson on Duolingo, so as not to lose my momentum.

 

I work in a shared studio in Porta Romana, called Omuamua, where we sometimes organise events and exhibitions with young artists and colleagues. It’s a place that comes to life through the people who inhabit it and the exhibitions we organise; so, I’m accustomed to seeing the studio as a hybrid space combining creation, dialogue and having fun together. Sometimes my studio mates say I’m just pretending to work… and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that they’re (at least partly) right.

In Groupware, I transformed the exhibition space into a performative office, living there for a month and devoting myself to research into contemporary systems of labour exploitation and self-exploitation. The materials produced gradually accumulated in the display window, giving shape to an ever-expanding archive capable of highlighting the pervasiveness of the theme without claiming to exhaust it.

In this series, I have developed a dialogue with an artificial intelligence, starting with questions about futures that are as yet impossible to verify. The images generated did not seek to represent the future, but rather to make visible the ways in which we imagine it, by linking technological hypotheses, desires, fears and memory. The work focused on the space of negotiation between algorithmic language and human interpretation, where the future has ceased to be a prediction and has become a narrative.

In this body of work, I have used one of the earliest versions of DALL·E to visually reconstruct dreams and memories – both my own and those of others – entrusting artificial intelligence with the task of attempting to translate deeply subjective experiences. The images, printed on thermal paper, are destined to gradually fade and change in response to their environment, transforming the instability of memory into a material quality of the work.

Through a performance developed in dialogue with Martino Santori, I explored the image as a temporary device, capable of coordinating gestures, relationships and bodies across a distance. Printed on sheets of soap, the frames of a domestic action were gradually dissolved whilst I washed my body, transforming the erasure of the image into a performative gesture and revealing a relationship of co-dependence built up over time, distance and repetition.

With Tachilalia, I rework supermarket receipts, transforming them into ceramics. After scanning the content, I have digitally rearranged the letters of the purchased items, creating anagrams, texts and short poems. Without planning the final result, the work leaves room for instinctive writing, in which meaning emerges through unexpected associations. The title refers to the alteration of language from which it takes its name: a rapid, fragmented way of speaking, in which words become distorted, interrupted and transformed.