Me, the black-box
Alessio Pellicoro
The diagnosis of an advanced stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma offered me the opportunity to see firsthand the vi- tal importance of photography which has now also become a tool of treatment for me. The course of the disease and therapy I face in these years have been an inescapable invitation to think about the forced and necessary inversion my practice has undergone: for the first time I have forced my gaze toward myself, or rather, within myself.
Referring back to Flusser’s theories, I am transformed into input savored and reprocessed by an endless series of algorithms constituting the “meta-bolism” of black-boxes to which I am thrown, devices and diagnostic instrumentation of all kinds (ultrasound, X-ray, CT, PET) with which I interface daily. I become raw material chewed up by a digital mind whose synapses are complex electronic processing that I imagine to be, absurdly, the developmental mechanism of an almost free interpretation of the aforementioned devices.
Through various software I scrutinized and explored diagnoses, pure and unresolved technical images if not subject to human interpretation. I become voyeur, observer, explorer and above all manipulator of a body immersed in intangible matter that fills the infinity of a fictional virtual world of which the virtual fetish of myself is the protagonist.
Such an operation over time has led me to realize that I myself am a black box capable of producing anomalies, masses, incongruities, results that are the consequential response, elaborated by means of “biological algorithms,” to a series of inputs sent by an external world that every day alters and contaminates intimate human nature. Mine.
Nel quasi invisibile
The archive is a useful medium for defending and consolidating our knowledge systems, as it offers us the possibility of generating new knowledge through the activation of other as yet unidentified connections between its constituent elements. Connections that can be unveiled thanks to an archaeological practice, which interprets the archive as a real archaeological site in which the act of “digging,” traversing the dense stratification of its contents, can bring out previously distant (or concealed) realities but which have always coexisted in the same space. An operation, this, of re-writing memory, well regulated and systematized through its first real mediator, the archive itself. Further extreme attempt to succeed in embracing the totality of existence in order to gain full control over it.
“Nel quasi invisibile” is a project that aims to represent, through photography, the complex archival system embodied by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione di Roma (ICCD). The opportunity offered me to enter its interior gave me a way to experience its spaces, to note the volume of memory it contains, to become fully aware of the way materials are managed and their vulnerability, and to understand the cause-and-effect relationship produced by the preservation and protection of our identity.
To look at the archive as a cosmos from which to extrapolate every little detail in an almost disposophobic way, further accumulating and fragmenting the representation of a place naturally instead predisposed to the systematic, and highly stratigraphic, management of the archival material it preserves. Thinking of my presence as a performative act triggered by a kind of “material turn” in which the recovery and appropriation of objects, traces, documents, materials, residues of the everyday, became the “causal” for the possible recovery of a reality hidden in space, gradually building over time my own personal archive that relates elements without pre-existing connections. Creating within a census place an additional “junk space”, as Rem Koolhaas would say, in which the politics of accumulation replaces hierarchy and composition with addition: “more is more.” Working on the seriality of gesture and gaze, as well as archival practices in its various forms and facets, extracitng contents from their “crates” as Walter Benjamin would do, to discover and rediscover them by dragging them into a present of which I myself become a trace.