Artist
Giaime Meloni
Giaime Meloni is a visual researcher with a PhD in Architecture, currently living between two islands: Île-de-France and Sardinia. The aim of his work is to explore the role of the photography as a sensible instrument to narrate the space complexity. His researches has been published in various publications (MAM Saint Etienne, INTRU). In 2017, he was shortlisted for Premio Graziadei with his long-term project Das Unheimiliche. He teaches photography as an instrument of the making of the architectural design between France and Italy.
My practice is conceived as an act capable of questioning the nature of places.
The images provide a tangible proof of my presence in the territory, in a certain way they documented it. However I would like to take distance compared to the documentation – and strictly documentary photography – in order to provide a more universal reflection on our relationship with the space.
The photographic action that I develop aims to questioning the restitution of ordinary space in search of a visual and spatial connection with the subject. The specific interest of this practice is to investigate, by theory and practice, the photographic instantaneity and the message that it carries.
The paradox of images is that they pretends to reproduce things which are only themselves. But this is only an illusion, a conviction that is a part of the magic contemplation. In fact, during the act of photographing, I realize that things denying their existence by the image.
What it remains frozen into the fragments is the (artificial) reflection of reality as an intention of my gaze.
Every photos prove that there is an implicit message exceeding the limits of the image itself. I accept that the message of the images can be corrupted / destroyed at any time by the viewer / reader.
Das Unheimliche
The concept of unheimlich, translated into english with the term uncanny, contains in its semantic complexity the same sense of impotence and disorientation that we feel when, visiting a place for the first time, we find ourselves in front of elements that seem familiar to us. This feeling triggers in us contrasting reactions like calm and fear. Recalling dreamlike situations in which reality and fiction are intertwined, the project is inspired by the aesthetic concept, that Sigmund Freud explored in the 1919 essay “Das unheimliche”. When the labyrinthine space of the children’s Colony in the former Eni village at Corte di Cadore is investigated through the lens of this concept, we question the restless familiarity of this place: “Have I been here before?”.
In the past two years, Giaime Meloni has spent intense and cyclical periods within the children’s Colony. Every visit was a renewed opportunity to establish a contact with the place, between visual memory and formal obsessions.
Unheimlich is finally a metaphor of the condition of contemporary living. This experience emphasizes the human need to construct a domestic dimension within a generic space, working on the intangible but palpable register of the unconscious. The search for the territorial familiarity also includes in an antithetic way its negation, of which the unheumlich is the definition.
The incessant repetition of some forms, subjects and colours within the sequence of images evokes the search for points of references that are capable of generating a sense of familiarity with the place.