“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes”
Marcel Proust
Constanza Piaggio’s present work, On the Other Shore, consists of one video and a series of seven pictures, which take us to the unique landscape found near what became her temporary home for three months, the Artists Residence Gyeonggi Creation Center in South Korea.
Confronted with a new territory which has its own language and codes, she tries through a visual language to go beyond the barriers of the unknown, looking to expand the limits of her closest world and to build a meeting point where understanding is possible.
By means of an intense exploration of the small island of Daebu, the artist makes it possible to assimilate the scenery and its codes, thus giving us a certain feeling of closeness. Her fix shot videos and her delicate pictures go all over diaphanous horizons, mysterious shipwrecks, suggestive fruits and rice fields moving slowly, allowing us to come along with her in her discoveries.
These fixed images, where time extends until it melts into a deep meditation, look to connect us both with the scenery and with what the artist isn’t able to filter through the camera. That is why the video is not subtitled: it puts into evidence the impossibility of the language and the fragmentation of the information. The artist recorded three people reading in Korean, thinking and telling stories about their country, their literature, their landscapes or their own lives. On one side, there is a girl reading an extract from the famous historical novel Toji (The Land) (‘토지’), by Korean writer Park Kyung-ni. On the other, the reasons why Choi Chun Il decided to write his book The Tidal Flats of Bay of Gyeonggi-do( ‘경기만의 갯벌’ ) and some life stories of a peasant woman from that region.
Depending on the context where the video is exhibited, the sound amplifies the meaning of the work. If exhibited in Korea, the different stories fuse with the images, enriching each other. Yet, the Hanja language won’t be understood anymore if it crosses the border, where it will get another meaning. The language will accompany the images as part of an aesthetic experience, creating an exciting empathy between the members of the audience and the artist’s experience in this remote Asian peninsula.
As Paul Strand said “Your photography is a record of your living – for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own”. The possibilities of coming across the unknown are infinite, but the vision that finds that unknown has to be always fresh and sharp, because it’s only through the oddness that new eyes can be born. In this way, Constanza Piaggio relates her life and her art, and places herself in this foreign world looking to create new links between the audience and the experience of being On The Other Shore.
Carolina Castro
Constanza Piaggio (Buenos Aires, 1982) has been an artist since 2004, and has until now participated in a number of Art Fairs, individual and collective exhibitions around the world, including; Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, the United States, Spain, France, Sweden and China.
From her beginnings in Buenos Aires, inspired by Art History and cinema, the artist has been interested in mastering the analogical photography technique, specializing in large formats. This has been very important for her aesthetic and conceptual search, by allowing her to obtain the maximum control of light and details.
Her relationship with Art History can be clearly perceived in the Conatus Series (2005-2008), where she carefully handles the palette of colors, light and poses, composing the images that would become inherent to her personal work.
This series is related to the word ‘Conatus’ in the sense given to the term by Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, according to whom Conatus is the tendency of all human beings to persevere, to keep on existing. In collaboration with the Argentinian photographer Res, the images produced by Piaggio center their attention in the search of the present time and the implicit assumptions in the photographic mechanism; the Renaissance perspective, the history of the pose and what might be termed ‘the pictorial unconscious’.
Early in 2007, the artist started to live and work between Paris and Buenos Aires, and a new aesthetic and historical search was triggered by the places where she was developing her work.
La trampa (The Trap) (2007-2009) is a series of photographs that use a more cinematographic language, where the eye of the artist becomes the eye of an art director. The characters seem to be trapped in the impossibility of doing something. This puts into evidence the different types of traps adopted by our society and the contemporary visual culture.
In 2009, at a more experimental stage and following that persisting concern about establishing relations between the world surrounding her and her art, she takes part in the Appelboom-La Pommerie Residence in Corrèze. There she formed the group Fugaz with the French artist Romain Sein. At the end of their time in the Residence, they set up together an exhibition called Les Contingences, inspired by the legends and tales of that ancient and remote French region. Within the same work, Constanza Piaggio carries out Recueils, formed by a video and four pictures where the artist herself performs the part of a woman that inhabits the stories of our childhood, where paradoxically being young and beautiful means being a source of multiple dangers. With this work she clearly introduces her concern for the situation of women, a subject that she had started working on in her previous project. Additionally, she defines her interest in the genre of performance, assuming a new lead role in front of the camera, and not only behind it.
In 2010, the artist finally settles down in Paris, where she starts taking a new direction, getting more and more interested in the possibilities of the moving image, and starts making regular incursions into video. As a result of her concern to understand the place where she lives and where her work is being developed, she has become deeply interested in literature and philosophy.
From September of this year, and during three months, she has taken part of the Gyeonggi Creation Center Artists Residence in South Korea.
The cultural distance between her native town, Buenos Aires, her residence city, Paris, and the city where the Artists Residence takes place, has become the starting point of her present exhibition.
The Other Shore is the start of the exploration of unknown territories, where the look is the only tool that allows discovery and comprehension. .
Early in 2007, the artist started to live and work between Paris and Buenos Aires, and a new aesthetic and historical search was triggered by the places where she was developing her work.
La trampa (The Trap) (2007-2009) is a series of photographs that use a more cinematographic language, where the eye of the artist becomes the eye of an art director. The characters seem to be trapped in the impossibility of doing something. This puts into evidence the different types of traps adopted by our society and the contemporary visual culture.
In 2009, at a more experimental stage and following that persisting concern about establishing relations between the world surrounding her and her art, she takes part in the Appelboom-La Pommerie Residence in Corrèze. There she formed the group Fugaz with the French artist Romain Sein. At the end of their time in the Residence, they set up together an exhibition called Les Contingences, inspired by the legends and tales of that ancient and remote French region. Within the same work, Constanza Piaggio carries out Recueils, formed by a video and four pictures where the artist herself performs the part of a woman that inhabits the stories of our childhood, where paradoxically being young and beautiful means being a source of multiple dangers. With this work she clearly introduces her concern for the situation of women, a subject that she had started working on in her previous project. Additionally, she defines her interest in the genre of performance, assuming a new lead role in front of the camera, and not only behind it.
In 2010, the artist finally settles down in Paris, where she starts taking a new direction, getting more and more interested in the possibilities of the moving image, and starts making regular incursions into video. As a result of her concern to understand the place where she lives and where her work is being developed, she has become deeply interested in literature and philosophy.
From September of this year, and during three months, she has taken part of the Gyeonggi Creation Center Artists Residence in South Korea.
The cultural distance between her native town, Buenos Aires, her residence city, Paris, and the city where the Artists Residence takes place, has become the starting point of her present exhibition.
The Other Shore is the start of the exploration of unknown territories, where the look is the only tool that allows discovery and comprehension.