Elena Cologni - Visual artist and researcher, active in interdisciplinary and participatory practices.
By choosing to live in England, Elena Cologni has tranformed her condition as foreigner into a transitory site for critical thinking and making. This being not only a starting point, but also a tool for redefining her own identity. Her art revolves around issues of memory and perception, and by investigating personal and subjective aspects of these, through an open analysis of her own experience, this in turn gives her a particular view on how to adopt collaborative strategies by looking at collective dynamics and methods. Elena Cologni's intellectual and interdisciplinary artistic career evolves through undertaking periods of study, and meeting with professionals within both the art and academic worlds, the artist engages with as active researcher, also by establishing collaborations with indifferent disciplines. From our interview arises the portrait of an artist constantly experimenting with, and re-inventing, her own very presence in front of the public. Cologni ultimately aims at re-elaborating negotiation strategies undelying human relations by proposing unconventional forms of interaction.
SA: Your choice of life in England. What did it mean to change place, and settle down in a different context, after having studied and worked in Italy. You are an artist and academic, researcher and mother. In which way did your life journey intertwined with the artistic one, how does life inspire your work?
EC: My work has always been for me a way to understand life and produce knowledge (in a very broad sense). “I was born a long way from where I belong and I am on my way home” as Bob Dylan said. I left Italy in 1994 to go to New York for a sabbatical, I was at the time teaching in a School of Visual Art in Bergamo, Italy. As an Artist I was pretty much by myself there, as the system of support for Italian artists called Gai was created only afterwards. I went back to my job in 1995 only to decide to get into full time postgraduate education in the UK, MA and a practice based PhD in Fine Art, I'd won a bursary for. The latter was a way to come to terms with what I had been trying to do in Italy without finding a context: to work in Fine Art informed by Visual Perception (Psychology) and Phenomenology. I then met my now husband and we settled down here. Even though the artistic scene in Italy is quite conceptual and thus could be sympathetic to my approach, if compared to the cultural landscape in England in the late '90s, what I was looking for in the UK was more of an academic context for advancing my research to substantiate my intuitions on engaging in a dialogue with other disciplines. And this started from contributing with my work to the “art practice as research” debate, to claim that art has its own research methodology, however paradoxical this might be, in order to ground my own. My experience as emigrant has been more or less embedded in my art making and with the arrival of my two kids, I needed to negotiate my developing identity outside Italy. As discussing my involvement in a new project with a Researcher at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Sociology, in my case the condition of been in between two cultures has been quite productive, and I was able to reconstruct my identity in a more transnational space. One of the issues I had to deal with leaving Italy was placing myself as woman within society, away from the preconceptions Italians still have about women. (I did grow up in a context where Sunday lunch had to be eaten quickly in order for my brother to arrive at his football match on time!). Time went by after that, but it was only leaving Italy that I was able to fully function as a person. My piece Ancora Cerca, was a way to address the process of subjectification by the institution. I engaged with the CCTV system of the Museum, appearing as an image among other displayed portraits. But the piece was for me a way to start thinking about the time involved in the making and re-organizing the documentation by layering representations of time by technology. Also, this work together with a series of stills (myme), was produced in a period when I was thinking of me as the only one in control of my image, the one choosing the viewpoint of the film shot with my image in it... viewers always choose where to stand when looking at a work of art: I wanted to open up a negotiation between powers and positions in space. An example of this was the video live installation In Bilico, Experience Of Aesthetic Pain(1) where the two video projections where from cameras positioned from outside the performance 'stage' (a u-shaped dining table) and from within (I was wearing it).
SA: A strong accent on research processes can be found both on your website and on your more recent blog. Many of your pieces are at the intersection of studies of perception, with video and 3D technologies, and creative experimentation. Can you talk a bit about these aspects of your work, and more specifically the importance of the interdisciplinary approach therein?
EC: My interest in always new scenarios in art means that I cannot work by adopting pre-used formats, and thus repeat myself. I guess that's why I found in research the appropriate context. It was probably in my nature to look for depth in that way and to allow a multidirectional approach. Italian art education left me a couple of very important and peculiar elements I carried with me: descriptive geometry and visual perception. Reading about geometrical representation systems and how we psychologically perceive what we see, made me aware of the political implications in positioning my video camera with a particular angle. However it is well before my formal research training that I practiced a widening of my horizon. I have a collection of tactile sketch books from 1992 full of notes and diagrams on Greek Optics as applied in architecture, patterns and geometric repetitions, and visualisations of philosophical concepts... Peripatetics used to walk up and down, up and down... I decided to start studying philosophy. But it was only through my PhD that a more rounded interdisciplinary approach converged in my art pieces. There are two considerations though, one has to make about the current discussion on interdisciplinarity. The first is that is it almost fashionable, but also understandably so, as one could argue that now virtually anyone can become an expert in any subject due to the access we all have through internet. And so artists go there to look for inspiration too. Although I tend to be a bit more skeptical about the level of engagement of wikipedia and still believe in the role of the hand turning a page of a book found by chance in a dusty corner. The other point is that the phenomenon is a political one here in the UK. Our government has cut quite a bit of funding to the arts and the only survival mechanism is to join venture with other disciplines. The result is a variety of tangent possibilities the creative mind of artists has come up with, within education, corporate collaborations, the digital... some successful and some less so. I constantly create contexts for interdisciplinary exchanges with scientists, philosophers, curators and sociologists, by way of testing if what I investigate through art has any parallel significance. With my current project Rockfluid,(2) a number of strands are finding their position in my work. One is the link between my work from late 90s' and my PhD on vision and perspective and the current interest on the role of technology in our lives. In particular since 1999 I claim that my art research is part of the critique to the ocular-centric discourse within western philosophy (Martin Jay). Yet, the fascination I have for perception and its psychology, and geometry (all linked to the primacy of vision) is a recurring aspect in my enquiry. Rockfluid has been for me a great opportunity to start a dialogue with a neuropsychologist with whom I share an interest in the relationship between memory and perception. Through meetings, workshops and events I incorporated aspects of the exchanged knowledge into newly conceived pieces for which I looked into notions coming from philosophy of science, but also resurrected a game I used to play as child either with others or using two pillars of our porch at home: L'elastico.
SA: At the moment you are also working at the University of Hertfordshire, in the AA2A Residency program, but your relationship with the academic context goes back in time. What is the role of cultural institutions - in particular Universities - in your work? EC: My thirst for knowledge in relation to art making, together with a way to support myself has naturally led me to Institutional contexts here in the UK, where experimentation and risk taking are welcome. I finished my PhD (funded by the University) in 2003 and won an Arts and Humanities Research Council award to pursue my post doc project 'present memory and liveness in delivery and reception of video documentation during performance art events, out of which came the series Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding and a book Mnemonic Present, Shifting Meaning. I was then appointed Research Fellow at York Saint John University (2007/2009). This academic links allow for an in depth dialogue with likeminded professionals and support my agenda of pushing art practice as research. This intertwines with the art professional context within which I present my work, and where the work is understood at various levels depending on the public's experience and background, hopefully not only by the cultured types. Through an open call I was selected to become studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre in 2007, where my peers are mainly professionals. I was supported by Donna Lynas (Director) who understood and supported the conceptual and experimental aspects in my approach. The AA2A residency is to allow me to produce some pieces for a site specific installation in the square opposite MK Gallery to conclude the work started there in October 2012, also part of my current project. My association now is more with the faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge supervising Mphil students, mainly due to my art practice as research methods, thus arising from my artistic practice.
SA: Talking about institutions, how important is for an artist the presence of an Art Council? As you know Italy does not have a similar funding body, while a lot of artists and cultural associations would strongly favor such an organisation. Which ones of your projects have been awarded such public funding?
EC: The Arts Council support artists development and does put them on the map through a number of different strands of funding opportunities. The funding body for my post-doc was a research council for the humanities (AHRC); whereas the Arts Council of England, Award for The Arts funded my residency at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2009), as well as my latest residency at the Faculty of Experimental Psychology of the University of Cambridge (Rockfluid). I was supported by both Antony Roberts (Director of Colchester Arts Centre) and Donna Lynas (Director of Wysing Arts Centre) for this, and it was part of the Escalator Live Art Program in the Council. Rockfluid was also selected for a Retreat, Escalator Visual Art program at Wysing Arts Centre. The Arts Council of England has had to face cuts, due to the current political climate, and so it is getting more and more difficult to find ways to be supported here as well. For me it was very important to be recognized as worth of these grants, and it gave me time and money to develop my work independently from the education Institutions and their agendas, one eventually has to come to terms with. Having said that, the Council does stress the importance of public engagement they like to see in projects they fund, and my work has always been of a participatory nature (since pieces like, comunicazione, Bretton Hall 1997).
SA: I now would like to refer in more details to your works and the themes you deal with such as that of memory. Starting with your Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding project, I would like you to trace the steps until the more complex body of work developed as part of Experiential. This , based on video and installation, evolved from the Creative Lab Residency at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow in 2006, but it has been very relevant to the work that followed. Here you particularly engaged with concepts of memory, perception and re-presentation of archives, can you talk about it?
EC: As a 'nomad', I consciously cherish the transitional quality of the present moment and the possibility of continually shifting its meaning in a 'future' present one (deferral, Derrida). This was first investigated in Tracing and Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding series. In the series the use of the document as ‘live-recording’ and ‘prerecording’ has opened up questions on the involvement of the audience and their perception of what is present, represented, how they memorize it; generating a form of ‘present memory’ of the event from which the notion of ‘mnemonic present’ takes shape.(3) The latter underlines the significance of the act of recollecting memories in the present, a way of translating while re-presenting reality, which affects the original trace of that memory. Our ways of experiencing, conceptualizing and translating reality make sense in the present and through perception.(4) These also relate to the way we experience it through video representation, no matter how delayed/deferred it may be, because even when we watch old footage we make sense of it in that very moment. Again, in the present. In this work as before, in terms of method, my re-occurring strategy is to locate/visualize a conceptual system with set parameters and work in a meta-linguistic fashion to overturn it: to create a paradox. In this sense, while focusing of the issue of the document for instance, which should be evidence of performance for research purposes, I allow myself to prove that only by shifting the attention to accepting the failure of its purpose, and adopting the deferral of its meaning as point of reference, I essentially free myself/work from the static position an academic ground requires. This body of work is based on my belief that memory relates to the present of its becoming, in contrast with the early Bergsonian differentiation between memory and perception based on the assumption that the former is linked to the past (representation) and the latter to the present (action). Memory thus relates to perception dynamics and has an important role in processing information.
The conclusion of the Mnemonic Present project has led me to conceive a more complex set of issues around time perception which are explored and developed in Experiential. Re-Moved, is a one-to-one video live installation, produced after a period of research about the Gorbals area (a purpose built area for immigrants, whose tenements houses where taken down in the 80s) during a residency at Centre for Conteporary Art in Glasgow and presented during Glasgow international 08. In this, I encountered participants and facilitated a dialogue while playing them some footage. We would address notions of memory as archival and removal, as I was trying to enhance the audience’s and my own experience of who we are in any given moment. Using video pre-recorded and archival material in the ‘presentness’ of the event, underlines the everyday’s condition of constantly engaging with (and processing) re-presentation of immediate or remote past, to make sense of the present. While working in a more socially oriented fashion I became interested in the psychological dynamics behind the relationship between memory and perception, while thinking spatially. This brought me to work on GEOMEMOS at the Yorkshipre Sculpture Park on the one hand, and also drove me to develop the project Rockfluid I discussed earlier.
SA: Your projects evolve through time, and are punctuated by phases within, often accompanied by a blog, diary or other forms of writing to open up to the process. How important is this aspect? Do you think an artist has to explain to the public, by showing the internal mechanisms, thinking processes and ultimately share the very theory behind the work? And how does all this conceptual construction meet the exhibition moment? Is it a separate thing, an experience of its own, or is it a different mean of communication for a similar investigation? We want to talk about language here, which you use in its many folds, but you then bring into your pieces, in particular in your more socially engaged ones, based on interaction.
EC: I believe that one of the dilemmas (the drive) for me is what to exhibit of the creative process, and at which point within it. I have a problem with defining something as 'finished' now that I work multimedia, as much as I used to when I was painting years ago. Now I realized that the process is what interests me the most. What I present to the public is never a finished piece but it represents a stage of this process. It is a document of it and it can take different forms: event, participatory exercise, installation, video, drawing... and it has to do with the before, during or after of an encounter with the audience. I do think that the research, or process, is an activity which underlines a political position, unstable and not fixed, the position of the 'unfinished'. But this is also linked to the importance of the performative aspect in my work and within the creative process, the moment for the realization of the performative self which happens when artist and audience meet, before, during or after an event takes place. In a sense is like allowing people into my studio, just outside of its walls. The methodology in Rockfluid for example allows others (audiences, participants and collaborators alike) to access my creative process at different stages and through different platforms. The choice is based on the value of the encounters with others as a site for sharing and creating new knowledge through art.
SA: I would like to understand which is the relationship between the two dimensions of time and space -fundamental also in the processes of memory - in your works. Furthermore is there a relationship between your theoretical journey and your experience as artist? Between the personal and social dimensions of these two categories?
EC: I believe that each artist's personal journey represents a social context, and I like the idea of interfering within different cultures with my own to layer different personal experiences through memories as a whole. I left Italy country as a very different place from what it is like now, that one now only lives in my memories. I come back to it as a foreigner, only, I understand the language. I trained myself to be open to changes and remove preconceptions by focusing on the present. In my work I focus on the perception and memorization of space and time in our everyday's experience. I guess that going back sometime now, I found my 'place' in the act of moving in space while drawing and that positioned my art practice in a conceptual phenomenological context. It naturally progressed from there. Currently, the overwhelming amount of information we get via technology, and the distorted perception of time and space which derives from this, is an illusional parallel world we get sucked in without realizing it. Rockfluid is an attempt to offer opportunities to regain a closer relationship with our 'lived space', within which we need to be absolutely present to deal with. I do this in different contexts and formats and for different audiences. For example the activity of walking around our cities and share our memories and thoughts, not from a remote location, but there and then.
The work related to this project develops through a number of steps: walking, drawing, site specific interventions and participatory exercises. The series of tours are site specific and have a different connotation in each place. After having met people in those locations I then trace maps of the tours in my studio and develop a series of drawings. One of them is then chosen to be proposed to the audience as part of a game: L'ELASTICO. It is based on a game I used to play as a child, and by overlapping this with a visualisation of those walks I thing I am trying to layer bits of identity from each person who participated, including me (is that how cultural memory takes shape in our society now?).
Another way to engage people in specific experiences of time and space is through Spa(e)cious. (5) In this the relationship Memory – Time – Perception is informed by Bergson’s notion of the present within duration and as produced by the body in space, and by Merleau-Ponty’s reference to ‘sensation’ as the basis for knowledge. On the other hand the role of memory in the present is seen from a shared perspective (art, psychology and philosophy of science) including the definition of specious present as well as the nature of retention as involving perception of duration. The variable within this is an element of interference in our physical experience, which varies every time Spa(e)cious takes place. The exercise creates the physical and psychological conditions to enhance an awareness of the perception of time and space through interaction in three parts, involving sculpture, psychology, drawing, and performance, while two projections of the space are shown. Spa(e)cious is built around a need to make the viewer aware of the space proximal to the body in relation to a technology-driven life where most of us become increasingly familiar with (and hooked into) the views form above (GPS, Googleearth, NASA satellites). The social element is becoming quite important in my work, I gradually push the boundaries of collaboration to allow space for negotiation and communication in my pieces and sometimes test trust within groups. This 'exercise' was conceived as another paradox, as while offering a shared physical experience, this also stresses how illusional our very perceptual apparatus might be. (6).
Elena Cologni. Artista visiva e ricercatrice, attiva nelle pratiche interdisciplinari e partecipative.
Scegliendo di vivere in Inghilterra, ha fatto della propria condizione di straniera un luogo critico e transitorio, non solo un punto di partenza, ma il sentimento di una continua ridefinizione della propria identità. La sua opera si articola tra i nodi della memoria e della percezione, indagandone non soltanto il risvolto soggettivo e personale, legato all'analisi attenta della propria esperienza, ma anche la dimensione collettiva, che osserva ed elabora attraverso la scelta di metodologie partecipate. Quello di Elena Cologni è un percorso intellettuale e interdisciplinare che si sviluppa attraverso lo studio e l'incontro con personalità diverse del mondo dell'arte, non soltanto visuale, e di quello accademico, che l'artista frequenta da ricercatrice attiva, instaurando collaborazioni con diversi settori disciplinari.
Nell'intervista che vi proponiamo viene fuori il volto di un'artista che sperimenta costantemente se stessa e il proprio esserci di fronte e insieme al pubblico, elaborando forme di interazione non convenzionali.
4. Issues of metamind in psychology, in Cologni, E., ‘Present-Memory: Liveness Versus Documentation And The Audience’s Memory Archive in Performance Art’, in Meyer-Dynkgraphe, D., International Conference Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, Cambridge Scholars Press, January 2006
5.http://rockfluid.com/cambridge-spaecious , this will be presented at PSi # 19, Stanford University, California, June 2013, before was at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge, UK; MK Gallery UK; Artra Gallery, Milan; Kingston University, London, UK, 2012.
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