Ramona Zordini: GUIDELINES ROUTINE
About The Exhibition
Layer upon layering the world is made up... people's personalities are stratified on them, but the body does so too, stratifying starting from what is most fragile and vital, composing itself like an onion layer upon layer up to the skin. so also plants, the vegetal world, the whole of nature and the world itself are stratified from the skin to the innermost core.
Starting from here the reflection moves on time and evolution, intertwined and stratified, one on top of the other.
Evolving means adding error after error, victory after victory, defeats and pain, one on top of the other to compose the final work of one's life. The Cyanotype technique directs the passage of time with its own rhythms, helping to find its own to stratify paper on paper, wetting it and re-wetting it, polluting it, dirtying it, living the paper as one lives an experience, and experience after experience composing the life of this work.
Imagine Narcissus, while you look at yourself in that mirror of water and you fall, you reconnect with the self that you were observing, but only by falling, there is no other way. Have you ever thought that being in the water is like being in another world, with other laws, and another ability to survive, so technically it is like not really being here. And if water is made of many drops, of many molecules that dance together, then it is conceivable that they can behave like the skin of an onion, enveloping everything inside itself and creating layers, layers that envelop or layers in which to look, like a small whirlpool that attracts everything. And in this tear in the paper as in the water the spectacle of life is staged, the life beneath the surface, beneath sociality and masks, life as it is felt only inside the water, when everything is muffled and full only of us.
I started photographing with analog in 1995 and then I switched to digital but I missed the artisanal way of doing things, of exploring with wonder the infinite possibilities of a work that takes shape depending on the external elements and the actions that generate it. After many years I discovered Cyanotype and other artisanal techniques able to pay homage once again to photography with this much-desired uniqueness. My subjects are mostly in water, an element I have been working with for 11 years now that captures the change between its folds and creates ethereal and impalpable portraits before my eyes.
I have been working with Cyanotype for 3 years and it fills me with wonder, the amount of experimentation that can be done with this technique is enormous. This series is composed of layered collages of toned cyanotypes and tells of a place where you have to dig and you find a treasure. Collecting treasures is the watchword, when nothing is in its place anymore, you dig.
I created this project by layering Cyanotypes toned one on top of the other to create the idea of a hole, a chasm made of tears that reveal the depth and its content, like a space that disintegrates layer after layer.
I have been working with photography for 20 years and with water in particular for 15, what has always attracted me about this liquid element and that creates stratifications on what it covers. This particular need has led me to this body of work, research, evolution, change itself have woven a common thread in the intention to dig to the center and the nucleus.