Going through the garbage
by Geoffrey Garrison
Deborah Ligorio's work draws general patterns within small everyday
experiences, looking from a distance into the interior. Her
work attempts to make abstract ideas visible, playing somewhere
between the concrete and the abstract, the visible and invisible.
Her videos adapt and appropriate language, music, and design
to indirectly comment on larger issues through individual existence.
Sorting through the garbage, she discovers patterns of human
experience, where the personal becomes general.
For the voice-overs of her videos, Deborah chooses to use English-the
language of the global market place, and of movies, television,
and popular music- rather than her native Italian. The spread
of the English language forces many people to attempt to express
themselves in a language that is not their own, changing the
language itself to fit their needs. Deborah's voice-overs are
written in this way, using the language loosely and personally.
Similarly, she uses technology associated with commercial design
to create the animations, adapting it to create an individual
space reflecting a more personal view of the world. The PC as
a tool is also accessible and immediate, allowing Deborah to
work through her ideas directly and with agility.
The subject matter of the videos are organized by a stream of
consciousness, ideas aligning through relational chains, sometimes
tying banal personal experiences to overwhelming reflections
of the outside world. Often she strings words together in associations
that are open, general, and abstract. The alternating patterns
in the animations play with her voice-overs, sometimes picking
up on something she describes, other times, as in the strings
of words, acting more to evoke something than to describe or
illustrate.
The "Custom Habitats, 2000" are designs for
imagined habitats based on individual's habits and personalities.
Deborah designed the shelters for others, keeping in mind what
space would be appropriate to them. Much of the design came
out of conversations with the recipients. Similar to how the
videos play between the external and the internal, the habitats
attempt to visualize abstract traits of individuals' personalities.
But the shelters are not just portraits; the work takes the
form of a conceptual gift to a person. To offer shelter to someone
is, of course, one of the oldest gestures of friendship.
For "Wired Under Water, video, 1999", Deborah
organized and directed an expedition to film a submarine telecommunications
cable. In the video, the underwater camera traces the cable,
parting seaweed fronds and scattering fish as it glides through
space. The meshes of leaves obscure the cable beneath them.
Algae and other plants have grown on the cable blending it into
its environment. The work grew from curiosity about the relationship
between the architecture within the Internet, the interface,
sites and appearance of the virtual space with which we are
all familiar, and the actual infrastructure needed to support
it. In this way, it was an attempt to uncover/discover something
inaccessible and invisible, to reveal the physical thing containing
so much activity, and to view concretely something as massively
abstract as the flow of information.
| Geoffrey
Garrison is an artist based in Berlin |
|
