A bird's eye view of dematerialised space

by Henrikke Nielsen

Although we both live in Berlin and move within frequently overlapping social circles, it was during a prolonged stay in Los Angeles that I got to know Deborah Ligorio and her work. Berlin and LA are cities made up of conflicting urban spaces – a subject that their art scenes have been dealing with intensely. But Ligorio's notion of space cannot be limited to that of the city, and, after becoming more familiar with her work, it was no surprise to me that, during her stay, she chose to document a 1600-kilometer drive away from LA (Donut to Spiral, 2004).

A profound understanding and communication of the space that surrounds us is evident throughout Ligorio’s works, whether she employs moving or still images, and whether she documents an existing reality or creates a parallel one through animation. The result of this commitment to a theme is not an artist trapped in constant repetition. On the contrary, every piece adds or subtracts a new layer of thought. According to Henri Lefebvre, space is a complex term that embraces all social activity but cannot be reduced to a merely physical frame: it is both a product of – and itself produces - social acts and relations . Ligorio’s work seems to grow out of exactly this complexity.

Time Recorded through Space

In Wired under Water (1999) Ligorio took us to the bottom of the Italian sea, only to lift us high, flying above her place of birth in the south of Italy, in Landscape (2002). In Donut to Spiral the means of transport is less spectacular and the ground is stable: we are simply driving. The main subject of the piece is neither the point of departure (LA) nor the destination (Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty), but rather the landscape passing in-between, filmed at a constant speed from the car window. It is an indirectly familiar landscape, and it is difficult, therefore, for us and for Ligorio, whose voiceover conducts us, to perceive it as real:

It lets you in while never allowing a comprehensive vision.
The dimensions are altered in a way that it becomes difficult to decide if it is reality or a Marquette.
It could be the 3D for a play station game, even though I can catch the wind and be surrounded by the scent.

Our everyday perceptions are shaped by new technologies, which allow for the phenomenon that media theorist Lev Manovich dubbed “digital compositing” . In computer games and digitally manipulated films (Matrix, for example), different spaces are combined into a single, seamless virtual space. In opposition to the technique of montage, in which visual, stylistic, semantic, and emotional dissonance are created between different elements, “digital compositing” aims to blend the elements into a seamless whole. Boundaries are blurred: a fictive landscape can be created in such a convincing way that we perceive it to be reality, and, on the other hand, we may perceive reality as fictive.
Returning to Donut to Spiral, Ligorio does not record the enormous physical and mental distance between the point of departure (LA) and the destination of our journey (Spiral Jetty) in real (driving) time (the video would last at least 16 hours). Instead, she has cut the material down to 7 minutes, mapping the distance with a landscape changing from desert to mountains and from sand to snow. Time is recorded through space, and time plays a crucial role in the destination of the trip: Smithson’s Spiral Jetty encompasses the traces of time - traces that the aesthetic surgery of LA and Hollywood try desperately to erase.

Dematerialised Space

The act of mapping becomes more literal in another recent piece by Ligorio, "Bird's Eye View" (2004). The piece consists of 15 boards in various sizes, on which are mounted maps, cutouts, and photos. The boards are hung randomly on two adjoining walls, together forming a collage. Whereas Ligorio navigates us through her videos frame-by-frame, the installation allows us to move freely. The background of each frame or board is a map printed on recycled paper. The maps could be those of an unspecified city, a visual representation of a spatial web or topography. Most are partly overlapped by paper cutouts of modernist architecture, images from magazines like National Geographic, or photos of windmills and satellites.

Each board forms a lose system of references. On one board, the headline ”You Can’t Fool Mother Nature” is set on the background of a colourful collage of exotic nature representations, placed alongside the photo of an elderly couple in a garden, the word ”sostenibile” (sustainability), and miniature dinosaurs in the corner. As in many of her videos, Ligorio’s own voice is present, here in the shape of small text inserts like “I also think of scientific applications which simulate intelligence in an artificial way, in connection with fuzzy logic, chaos and entropy.” On another board, aerial views are combined with a group of people jumping high in the air, and the text ”Places conceived for intimacy (vs. collectivity) where space is not merely the result of built environments but also a product of social relationships.” The texts function as an associative trajectory for a line of thoughts, and are constantly lingering between objective observations and personal or sometimes banal comments like ”please remind me that I am a human being” or ”I should remember to take my vitamins!” (Donut to Spiral).

The act of mapping necessarily involves objectivity and the leaving out of certain details in order to achieve a comprehensive whole. But in ”Bird’s Eye View,” objectivity is constantly interrupted by personal commentary and detailed images that together terrorise a seamless whole. The space that Ligorio pursues in her work is a dematerialised one that can never be completely mapped or documented, and this is exactly what she illustrates when using the medium of collage. Contrary to the above-mentioned ”digital compositing” technique that creates a fictive space hard to differentiate from reality, the collage leaves the various sources of images (paper cut-outs, photos, maps, etc.) obvious. The collage is open and non-conclusive, and therefore a perfect medium for the rendering of the complexity of space. We are witnesses to Ligorio’s constant process of reorganising, negotiating and re-mapping - a process in which she celebrates the potential of error:

I am interested in the possibility of making a mistake, as a human characteristic, and I see in error the potential feature of uniqueness, and consequently an aesthetic which cannot be reproduced.