Going Through The Garbag

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