Principle Hope

MANIFESTA7,
The European Biennal of Contemporary Art,
Trentino – South Tirol (I) - Exhibition Catalogue

Deborah Ligorio is a diarist of landscape, carefully registering and reflecting upon its social, political and environmental transformations. Her work (video, prints, collage, installation) might belong to still not catalogued genre of poetic ethnography, possibly comparable with the desires of psychogeographers or passions of 18th century explorers, obsessed by space's historical dimension, the cultural significance of the place and the grammar of belonging.

Each project by Ligorio is a particular study of the vernacular which the artist approaches from a radically subjective perspective: her investigations of landscape's and geography's identity is meticulously filtered through the artist's own perception of the site, from the narrative point of view (a sort of spatial story) as well as from the very mode of narrating in which the artist is using her own voice "off-screen", automatically mythologizing the site and rendering it more surreal, dream-like. Landscape is turned into a gesture, an emotional state of mind.

Ligorio's contribution to Manifesta 7, her new video-poem, "The Submerged Town" is a journey into the (urban) memory of the region of South Tyrol. Artist refers to the engineering project of the Montecatini Company to build an artificial lake which would connect two natural lakes, Lake of Resia / Reschensee and Lake of Curon / Graun, simultaneously submerging several villages in the neighborhood.

The film concentrates on the portrait of a campanile turned into a metaphor of everyday struggle and adaptation. Mapping a disappearance and desperately trying to record a trace of a former presence, Ligorio's work oscillates between magic and reality, not loosing its critical stance towards the policy of urban and environmental redevelopments projects.

Adam Budak