DEBORAH LIGORIO: DONUT TO SPIRAL (2004)

by Christiane Rekade

Deborah Ligorio’s newest film arose during her residence in Los Angeles in the “MAK Schindler Artists in Residence Program.” In the film, she describes a car trip from LA through the California desert to Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in the Great Salt Lake. Conceptually, she positions two rings at the beginning and the end of the trip: the oversize doughnut advertising the pastry at the LA airport and Smithson’s spiral.


driving driving driving

Camera aimed fixedly out the car window, Ligorio records the unpopulated, seemingly untouched landscape at a consistent speed. During the drive, the desert changes to rocky terrain; the bay color of the sand gives way to the white of the snowy landscape. The artist begins the chain of thoughts and associations, commenting from off screen on the passing scenery: “Mi è sempre piaciuto osservare il paessagio che scorre fuori dal finestrino.” Ligorio’s film is no road movie. It is a departing, a scanning of a strange landscape that is at the same time familiar from countless Hollywood films, from advertisements and the media. During the drive as well, one cannot entirely escape the impression of a filmsetting. It is difficult to perceive the landscape out the car window without the television and cinema images in the back of one’s head. We, along with the artist, are almost disappointed when “Spiral Jetty” – perhaps the most photographed work by Smithson – is revealed at the end of the journey not in the exemplary contrasting red and black, but rather as a white structure in a snowed-over lake.


View from a distance

The artist already turned her analytic gaze onto landscapes in earlier films. “Wired Under Water” (1999) shows the course of a telephone line at the bottom of the sea. In “Landscape” (2002), she observes her native Puglia from a bird’s eye perspective. Seen from a distance, the landscape of southern Italy becomes a map of various colored fields and lines. In her research on the routes of telephone lines in the oceans, Deborah Ligorio creates a new network, new relationships on the map of the world. The drive to the Great Salt Lake is also a kind of survey, a cartography of a landscape of which we already have thousands of images, stories and memories.

(Trans. Geoffrey Garrison)