Lorenzo Vitturi

Quotes from http://www.timeout.com/london/art/lorenzo-vitturi-interview-ive-always-been-interested-in-states-of-precariousness

Why focus on Ridley Road market?
'The market is a symbol for Dalston, with its African and Middle Eastern communities, and how it's been changed by gentrification over the past few years. I really tried to find a way to express the beauty of the place, which is unique, and at the same time to describe the condition it finds itself in.'


immediately his work is about change, the simpler place gentrified to something else, from colourful vibrant working class to middle class plain society. he wants to show the place in truth, the thing that attracted him in the first place - the colourful communities with colours from their homelands, and how it is changing to something else, is it better or worse? I haven't been to dalston, but to elsewhere in hackney and Shoreditch and they are, or were when I visited them, wonderful vibrant places full of life and people everywhere, going about their business or hanging with friends or enjoying the sun and the parks.


You make three-dimensional objects and take pictures: are you a sculptor or a photographer?
'I studied photography but my work has always existed between sculpture, collage, set design and photography. Using all this organic stuff like fruit from the market, photography is the only way capture it - otherwise something might only last for five minutes.'

his work is about making something permanent from something that is just temporary, its about retaining that beauty, retaining organic 'matter like fruit from the market' for longer, like how one might buy frozen vegetables, the photograph is the fruit frozen in time.


Why does your work look like it's about to fall apart?
'I've always been interested in states of precariousness. I'm from Venice, which has been falling apart for centuries in the most beautiful way, so I think it's something that's a part of me.'

his home has influenced his outlook on the world, now he wants to create work which reflects his becoming into the world, the place he grew up in has made him who he his, which reflects into his work.
what about where im from how does that affect me? what is Croydon like? pretty grey, dull nothing there that anyone needs to visit. is this what im trying to say with my work? that the dullness pervades through me? I have nothing to say because there is nothing interesting or nothing of note from my upbringing?
perhaps a future idea is tell the story of Croydon, the millions of people, the differences, the problems, the communities, and the broken blur of all the people individually going through the town all mashed together, there is so much variety that there is no variety because it all washes together into a blur, its like all the things in London mix together into Croydon.
but what to do now? is that why im interested in something small and controllable, it has no relevance to the outside world? the potted plants are just there to look pretty and serve no other purpose; I guess if Croydon wasn't there, would the world miss it, is that what I wonder? or are the plants like the photograph, the personification of one person working to make something pretty that you see in the image, that one might see in a flower in a garden?


Why does your work look like it's about to fall apart?
'I've always been interested in states of precariousness. I'm from Venice, which has been falling apart for centuries in the most beautiful way, so I think it's something that's a part of me.'

perhaps that is the attraction of Croydon, there are lots of building works going on, it seems everytime I travel through there now, there is a new building being constructed, there is always a development happening, or the buildings that were being built reach further completion, theres always something new, however I feel that Croydon itself doesn't change at all, its the same streets the same people the same business. for example there was a record shop that was having a closing down sale, for what felt like 5 years, I wonder if they are still open now 10 years later.
so am I trying to say my work is a metaphor for that? not at all, but it must have some relevance to my work if that is my upbringing, that's where I was born into the world.


Can you see yourself moving away from the area?
'I've been making this work for two years, so maybe my next project will be about somewhere else. My girlfriend was living in the Central African Republic and she discovered this huge market in the middle of the jungle selling only Western products. I love the idea of finding the exact opposite of Ridley Road.'

imagine a place in India or Jamaica, that was full of people born in south London, oh my that would be funny to see.


Quotes from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/13/lorenzo-vitturi-ridley-road-markets-edgy-dynamic-east-london-photographer

the result, Dalston Anatomy, became one of the most acclaimed photography books of 2013: a set of pictures that are as far away from traditional street photography as it is possible to go, while still evoking the cacophonous energy of the street.

the more i think about it, the more i think my work would suit a book, i think the size of the images, with my idea of having overlapping images suits that. i could have a page with an image on, with an overlapping image, then a blank piece of paper double sized, then the next set of images on one page, repeated like this, however, i also have a vision of a large white space, where each frame is on a wall, or maybe a couple on each wall but spaced far apart, almost lost in the whiteness of the walls. then you get close and can turn the image to the next one. so perhaps for this review in 3 weeks that is my result on the walls, and for the photobook project i can create the other idea for that.

For his next project, Vitturi turns his magpie eye to his native city, Venice, where notions of precariousness and transience take on an almost epic dimension. "I'm interested in the fragility of things and what you can do with that as an artist," he says, "so Venice is an obvious location. But it is also my home and I feel strongly about what is happening there. Everywhere, even Venice, is becoming homogenised. Likewise Ridley Road. You want it to be protected somehow from the gentrification and the creeping sameness, you want it to exist in its own way on its own terms."


Quotes from http://www.vogue.it/en/photography/interviews/2015/01/22/lorenzo-vitturi/

The images reclaim the manual and physical element of painting and sculpture moving in the direction of an oxymoronic and auratic restoration of the photographic work.

what does this mean? that he uses his knowledge of painting and sculpture, to sculpt and paint, and that the their aura is captured and then restored using photography, which seems oxymoronic compared to painting and sculpture, what with photography being about stillness and frozen time and painting and sculpture being about form and colour and movement

“Dalston Anatomy” is, in fact, a representation of a disappearing reality – the multicultural aspect of Dalston neighbourhood, constantly threatened by an intense and unstoppable gentrification wave that has forced many of the locals to leave the area.

The still lifes are a very important part of “Dalston Anatomy”’s poetics: deciduous compositions created by Vitturi and that, due to the perishable nature of their components and the precariously balanced shapes, have a life-span of a few minutes, a few hours at most.

his work reflects the area, he has a clear way of saying his point to us the audience, that the place and all these wonderful people and colours and moments are disapearing

“Dalston Anatomy” is not intended to narrate a single story: each image of the book contains the ingredients for a potential story – “I try really to find different way to represent the uniqueness of a place, through the use of its material, its textures and its shapes, its colours, something that completely feels like all ingredients of a universal language, that’s why I wasn’t really interested in a single story, and that’s why also the book doesn’t follow any single narrative, just use this kind of colours, shapes, and reading textures”.

several interesting points here, that his book isnt a narrative, which is interesting, as due to a books nature most books are, maybe if i was to see the book i would naturally be looking for a narrative. i also think its so interesting that he is in a way documenting the place without directly photographing the place at all, maybe my work is about my home, my family? my ma who makes the flowers into pots?, hmm maybe sort of, more my own reaction and stresses taken out into a photo form in a simple way. he shows the place so vividly, he gets his point across, its a work of imagination really - like storytelling, is it photographic truth? or is it just a flavour and the rest is up to you to work it out? the textures and colours and shapes give us a flavour and we can imagine the rest, it goes back to what i was reading in Hanno Hardt's Constructing photography fiction as Cultural Evidence, about we need a cultural awareness to understand photographers work,, and thats why some works of 'fiction' or 'storytelling' work well.

There are always these kind of two forces that work together, but I’m saying that for example now that I started to work with galleries and I have to deal with all the needs of the collectors, I still really decide and I got a lot of problems, for example, to maintain the roughness of Dalston anatomy also in the pictures themselves, because I didn’t want to mount the pictures, and really sleek, and really clean with the really expensive frame, so I mounted on wood trying to really create a unique piece that was something… You know, so a way I’m trying to push your vision, and at the same time you have to survive”.

sounds like he had some ideas of what he didnt want to do with his project, but had to bow to pressure to make money to live, sounds like hard pressure, at least he is able to talk about it afterwards and be in a good place

Quote from http://www.americansuburbx.com/2014/01/interview-interview-lorenzo-vitturi-2014.html

To understand this you have to imagine the market, its products and its people like a whole single body, which I dissect using the camera as a surgeon’s knife and my studio as a laboratory. During the anatomy process I selected the elements/fragments which I thought were more interesting, exclusively in terms of their shape or colour.

This is a beter way of saying what i was trying to explain in my previous paragraph

Following their selection, I brought all these fragments in my studio and I mixed them all together, during a sort of promiscuous game where sculpture, collage and painting melt together, and I recreated a series of new anatomies, whose features only exist in my own visionary world.

perhaps dalston market only exsists in his imagination, i think actually this is true, because we are all different people, we all see different thing up to the point we look at the same piece of artwork, and this leads us to make different assumptions about it, so dalston market would not appear the same to anyone else but him.

From the beginning I knew that the book was the best medium to communicate what I had in mind, therefore throughout the process of collecting images, forging atmospheres, making sculptures, I was already editing the book. This helped me to find a optimal visual coherence between all the different visual outputs I was coming up with.

hopefully this knowledge of mine, with the end result in my mind, i will be able to edit already in my mind, as soon as i see my images coming out of the R4a machine (colour paper processer).

My studio is quite an explosion of chaos as well but when the chaos starts to overwhelm the entire space I need to control it and go back to order, or I would not find space to sleep (I live and work in the same place). But I can tell you that while I was working on Dalston Anatomy, sometimes it really seemed that the market itself- with all its smells, materials and colours had entered into my studio. I remember coming back at home and having the feeling that I was walking into the market again.

This sounds amazing, he was really living inside his artwork, living and breathing every moment, he put his soul into this work, thats why it is so good

LV: In a way the physical proximity with the materials and the objects I collected helped me to build a deeper relationship with the market’s world and with the sculptures themselves: minute after minute I could witness these objects’ transformation and I could provide documentary evidence of their temporary life.

more clues that he was inside the work, that while he was making it he was learning a greater understanding of why he was making it and who was helping him make it, like i said earlier its a documentry piece without the need to photograph the actual location, in this way its a beautiful piece of storytelling

My interest in sculpture begun when I was working as a still-painter in the movie industry in Rome.
The fact of building large scale sets by using sculpture, architecture and painting, and these sets’ precarious life (they were made to last just a few minutes, during the shooting) made me start to think about objects that are only made with the purpose of being photographed.

Fiction, which has always been used in order to transmit some key messages such as power and belief – through art and religious representation – has now been extended to every domain of society and the self. I find that fascinating and scary.

such an important quote

Quotes from https://thephotographersgalleryblog.org.uk/2013/12/16/in-a-changing-market-an-interview-with-lorenzo-vitturi-on-dalston-anatomy/

The last revelation was that all these images I was producing were not just simply the result of my secret imagination, but they were in fact deeply connected with a wider reality. They were fragments of a bigger picture, my own “bigger picture” – which also clearly includes the place I live in and the community that I love and care for.

What I am interested in is not to criticise gentrification but to visualise what this process of transformation will leave behind. I am interested in what soon will be seen as memories – debris from a lost time. I wanted to freeze Dalston’s colourful mix of cultures just before this transformation changes the neighbourhood’s appearance completely.

speaks about photography and its use to freeze time

In fact if you visit the exhibition, you will realise that it works whether one looks at it from the side or from above, at one piece, at two pieces together, or at the whole installation. To me the world appears like a chaotic alphabet of shapes, colours and patterns that I record in order to mix them and remix them in my studio, trying to reach a state of temporary harmony in the final image .