Machina Mundi | Quarantine – Social isolation in the pandemic

    Machina Mundi | Quarantine – Social isolation in the pandemic

    Viewing Room
    Curatorial Text : Marcello Dantas
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    Isolamento Eduardo | Plate SF DJI 0278

    , 2020

    Cloister

    One of the clearest reflections I had during this remarkable year is that the Pandemic and Isolation are not the same phenomenon. The pandemic is an event of a collective nature, which affects public health, science, and politics. Isolation is an event of a psychological nature, with an impact on mental health, self-esteem and our connection with ourselves and our values, it is a pause, an opportunity, and a moment of revelation. Claudio Edinger understood this and decided to venture into an initiative to capture the spirit of the closure of each one in a rare moment of synchronicity of situations. The result is lyrical.

    The portrait as a distant witness of compulsory isolation. A kind of clear mirage of someone in a diffuse context, an outsider’s point of view that is quite impossible. A photo that was not seen, but that was captured. The search for the lowest common denominator of what each person led to their island of isolation. The minimum condition of permanence that reveals the personality of each portrayed, their guitar, their nudity, their bathtub, their place. The condition of reclusion humanizes us, shows us vulnerable and real.

    The event of the 2020 pandemic is one of the most important facts in our history, but an event that produced few images. Out of respect for the victims, and the contexts of isolation, the pain materialized in the form of numbers and graphs. But the memory of an entire generation will be marked by what happened in their intimate space. That’s why this project is really unique, it reveals something about a void common to all.

    Isolamento Dado e Marina | Plate DJI_0151

    , 2020

    Isolamento Lipe | Plate DJI_0647

    , 2020

    Isolamento Vitor Marigo | Plate DJI_0445

    , 2020

    Being able to photograph each one’s emptiness seems to me an ambitious commitment. Photography always values ​​capturing the moment of action in its fullness. Edinger, sought to portray the opposite, non-action, boredom, waiting, the infinite contemplation of time, respecting each environment as the context that protects and identifies them.

    Claudio Edinger is a photographer educated in the multiple possibilities of photographic languages, but he was absolutely happy to develop a technical solution that would translate our zeitgeist. By being portrayed by him, I understood the change in the geometry of the relationship between photographer, portrayed and the drone. The Drone acts as an entity of its own, inoculating reality with a robotic intervention that positions itself among the humans who work there at its service. The system has defined the point of view, distancing is imperative. The Drone delimits this. The photo is the portrait of a situation, not necessarily of a person. It is at this time that the context reveals itself and says something about the time we are in.

    There is something artificial in the photographs, they all seem staged, but therein lies the greatest truth of the project, the situation we live in is artificial, it generates a certain estrangement of ourselves with our intimacy. We had to invent a new intimate space, inject a dose of dreaminess into life that felt repetitive, develop abandoned talent, connect with others in new ways. Quarantine life didn’t seem real to us and the new normal was never naturalized. This is evident in the stronger-than-life color saturation and accurate composition of each photo. Over the years I learned that the greatest truths are told in lies.

    Marcello Dantas

    Isolamento Alessandro – Piscina | Plate SF-Vs1

    , 2020

    Isolamento Guto | Plate DJI_0204

    , 2020

    Isolamento Janeth Haiti | Plate DJI_0091

    , 2020

    Isolamento Pepe Palhaço | Plate DJI_0785

    , 2020
    Claudio Edinger

    Aérea RJ Serra dos orgãos Montahas | Plate CLAU2194

    , 2020

    Machina Mundi – Los Angeles | Santa Monica Pier – Plate Vs2

    , 2020

    MACHINA MUNDI

    Claudio Edinger’s work flourishes in the wake of the digital revolution, between the 1970s and 2000s, which gave impetus to an intertwined web of changes and displacements. In the year 2000 Claudio starts to photograph with a large format camera, a 4×5, which marks the beginning of his research with selective focus. This is a practice that concerns the depth of field on the surface of the photo, where we see only one plane in focus and everything else blurred. For Claudio, this constitutes “a visual paradox that highlights the metaphor of our contradictions”.

    In the current series Machina Mundi, the artist marks a place marked by complex temporalities, situated between the represented image of the photographic and the image of abstract painting. This place between images expands the time of the snapshot and gives us the opportunity for a prolonged observation, a quasi-immersion, which reaches the observer in a quasi-present past. But he does so by reviewing the history of modern art for our eyes. Gradually, he incorporates a series of procedures to the photos, ranging from approximations to Impressionism – in the dilution of image contours – to the slight deconstruction of representation.

    This approach to painting – which we could already appreciate in its previous phases in the intense coloring that reminded us of Gauguin – seems to enhance the meaning of discourse in the almost pictorial treatment given to urban landscapes, which result in a kind of photo-painting. As the representation of the real fades away, the vanishing point preserves its sovereignty in two-dimensional space. We are now dealing with different depths of field, in a numerous photographic series, which leads us to think about the fraying of the limits of photography. If before the focus was on the signifier, now a liquid space plays a leading role.

    The image we see today in Machina Mundi configures a fluctuation between the photographer’s eye and the camera lens. By mixing the referent to the expression of reality apprehended as if it were between mists, Edinger insinuates tenuous boundaries between the possible and the impossible. He explores the relationship between real space and created space and by bringing the invisible to us, he makes visible what has no space of its own. We are faced with situations of suspension, one step away from overflowing, facing unusual spatialities, from which connections between places and buildings spring up.

    When researching new language constructions, Claudio enters his poetic repertoires in the cracks of the metropolises. In the silence and solitude of the intervals that his referents evoke, he places us in front of real landscapes, to which he gives a fictional character through approximations to the pictorial. They are almost sets, which remind us of films in which traces of abandonment are revealed; would these be signs of evasion in these cities that border on a Blade Runner aesthetic?

    Benjamin’s visionary reflections allowed us to think about the history of technical images and that of the media in the light of the transformations of production relations and cultural changes in the 20th century. Updating this legacy means reviewing a series of changes in the ontological field and in the field of art. These mutations in the modes of perception in aesthetics and in social experience, imply a vision that now takes into account the incidence of the digital, which made photography subvert its initial documental function and also the function of representing the real – or the of record – which she had for photographers until the 1960s.

    For Fatorelli, photochemical-based media underwent a redefinition based on information technology:

    “the transition from the light signal to the electronic signal marks the transition from modernity to contemporaneity, putting into perspective the material and symbolic values ​​associated with photocinematographic representation, based on the analog mode of inscription, projection and diffusion of the image”.

    If in its beginnings photography was responsible for documenting facts, while cinema was dedicated to narratives and was seen as a means of mass communication, the fact is that it promoted changes in the representation system. These changes that deconstructed the representation of reality in painting began in Impressionism with the dilution of image contours and reached Pollock’s Informal Abstractionism, with the drip-painting technique.

    In Claudio’s work, the documentary is not exactly a function, but an archival practice. His shots of human types, the capture of insanity and the encapsulation of time, over the years, lead us to understand Edinger’s work from the perspective of the archives. He photographed madness, abandonment, poverty, the bizarre, the popular, in short, his research touched on various stages and themes of photographic modernity, and the accumulation of these images suggests the idea of ​​collection and archive.

    In the words of Edinger, “in photography our capacity grows to face the great catastrophe, the greatest disaster faced by man: time”. Over twenty years, selective focus research – which began as an experiment that strained the illusion of the Renaissance perspective code – matured and opened up into a new spatial dimension. Now space constellates different temporalities in his work. By stretching and problematizing time, the inexhaustible attempt to recreate the universe of art and life appears.
    In the archive created by the artist, what we see is art, capable of expressing the ills of collective voices. We think of everyday life in relation to the conflicts of reality and also of art as a libertarian field, a possibility of transforming internal personal spaces. All transposed to the dialectical universe of social experience, a field of expanded perception, to be affected by the discomforts and charms of living in a complex culture. And to ask ourselves what are the directions for new behaviors, what is the place of social criticism today, what is our place in the world.

    References
    Bennjamin, Walter, “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique”, Ed. Alla, Paris, 2007.
    Fatorelli, Antonio, “Contemporary photography: between cinema, video and new media”, Ed. Senac Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, 2013, p.18.

    Daniela Bouso

    Aérea SP Prédios e nuvens | Plate AER_0207

    , 2020

    Aérea RJ Serra dos Orgãos | Plate CLAU2068

    , 2020

    Aérea Santo Angelo nuvens de chuva | Plate DJI_0880

    , 2020

    Claudio Edinger
    Rio de Janeiro, 1952. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

    Graduated in Economics, Claudio Edinger is the author of 14 photographic books and a novel. He began teaching photography in 1979 at Parson’s School of Design and later at the International Center of Photography, both in New York.

    He started photography in the early 1970s while studying economics at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie in São Paulo. In 1975 he had his first solo exhibition at MASP, with photographs of the Martinelli building in São Paulo. The following year he moved to New York, where he lived until 1996.

    Claudio Edinger’s photographs have appeared in the most important magazines in the world, including Stern, The New York Times, London Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Frankfurter Allgemeine, El País, Time, Paris Match, Newsweek, among others. His works have been exhibited at the ICP in New York, the Pompidou in Paris, the Photographer’s Gallery in London, Perpignan Photo Fest, France, Higashikawa Photo Fest, Japan, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS), Itaú Cultural Institute, House of Jewish Culture and Banco do Brasil Cultural Center.

    Currently, his work is part of several private and public collections.

    Isolamento Eduardo | Plate SF DJI 0278

    , 2020
    Isolamento,
    impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
    160 x 130 x 5 cm,

      Isolamento Dado e Marina | Plate DJI_0151

      , 2020
      Isolamento,
      impressão de pigmento mineral no papel Hahnemühle,
      160 x 130 x 5 cm,

        Isolamento Lipe | Plate DJI_0647

        , 2020
        Isolamento,
        impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
        160 x 130 x 5 cm,

          Isolamento Vitor Marigo | Plate DJI_0445

          , 2020
          Isolamento,
          impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
          160 x 130 x 5 cm,

            Isolamento Alessandro – Piscina | Plate SF-Vs1

            , 2020
            Isolamento,
            impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
            160 x 130 x 5 cm,

              Isolamento Guto | Plate DJI_0204

              , 2020
              Isolamento,
              impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
              130 x 160 x 5 cm,

                Isolamento Janeth Haiti | Plate DJI_0091

                , 2020
                Isolamento,
                impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
                130 x 160 x 5 cm,

                  Isolamento Pepe Palhaço | Plate DJI_0785

                  , 2020
                  Isolamento,
                  impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
                  130 x 160 x 5 cm,

                    Aérea RJ Serra dos orgãos Montahas | Plate CLAU2194

                    , 2020
                    Machina Mundi,
                    impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
                    160 x 200 cm,

                      Machina Mundi – Los Angeles | Santa Monica Pier – Plate Vs2

                      , 2020
                      Machina Mundi,
                      impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
                      130 x 160 x 5 cm,

                        Aérea SP Prédios e nuvens | Plate AER_0207

                        , 2020
                        Machina Mundi,
                        impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
                        160 x 200 cm,

                          Aérea RJ Serra dos Orgãos | Plate CLAU2068

                          , 2020
                          Machina Mundi,
                          impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
                          160 x 200 cm,

                            Aérea Santo Angelo nuvens de chuva | Plate DJI_0880

                            , 2020
                            Machina Mundi,
                            impressão de pigmento mineral no papel hahnemühle,
                            160 x 200 cm,