The body is a revelation as is landscape // Sofia Masini

PHROOM

SOFIA MASINI

The body is a revelation as is landscape

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published by: Witty Books
text by: Matteo Cremonesi

In her recent photographic work, Sofia Masini interrogates the language of images and the usual representation it has produced of the body and the landscape throughout its history. Through a linguistic praxis that is both sensitive and playful and open, Masini reworks the iconographic tradition associated with the representation of these subjects. By means of work, composition and recomposition, the artist rethinks the relationship of complicity, difference and contraposition that these subjects historically embody in Western narration and iconography. Reporting with criticality the limit of an ontological determination and distance between these two elements, body and landscape meet to give form, space, to a new body in which the parts are lost in each other.

Using the technique of collage, Masini carries out an elegant visual reflection, the outcome of which is the reworking of photographic images of self-portraits and landscapes from the author’s own archive in order to create—in the encounter between the parts of one and the other—a new image in which to concretise and represent a different possibility of language. The blurred, overturned, cut, mutilated body is related to the landscape, to its material, to its forms, decontextualised, reduced to a combinatory element, to a useful portion, necessary for the composition, for the reconstruction of a different formal balance.

The body revisited through a linguistic praxis that employs it as an element and part of an assemblage of images, of a playfu gesturality, becomes living matter that Sofia Masini employs to free the representation of the body, of herself, of the landscape, from the formal and narrative constraints in which photography, as before these other languages, had organised and disciplined it.

The body is a revelation as is landscape is an elegant project, able to oscillate between playfulness and the urgency of a rethinking, an intimate revisiting of subjects and memories. The attempt to experiment for the same images and imagery a new form, a new perspective order or disorder through which to discuss, re-decline both the impression produced by the images themselves, and the narratives behind them.

Cadenced by a careful process of arrangement and association, the book documents the work the author has done since 2019, identifying and concretising another way of looking at things and images. An otherness on the world that sees in the spontaneity of gestures, in the tension produced by the search for a different form for what is already known, the focus and value of its own praxis.

Born in 1991 in Madrid, Sofia Masini lives and works in Milan. She received a BA in Cultural Heritage from the University of Milan and continued her studies with a Master in Photography at the IUAV University of Venice. Her interest in the body, meant both as a heuristic tool and as an object of inquiry, guides her artistic researches. Her work has been exhibited in independent spaces and Italian institutions, among others: MAR Museum (Ravenna, 2019), Micamera (Milan, 2020), Diecixdieci Festival (Gonzaga, 2021), Fabbri Foundation (Pieve di Soligo, 2021), Condominio (2021, Milan), Preus Museum/Norway’s National Museum of Photography (Horten, Denmark 2022). Her first photobook, The body is a revelation as is landscape, will be released in 2023 by the Italian publisher Witty Books.