A contemporary look from slowness
In a world where most photos exist only as files on a screen, working with ancient processes and sensitive materials is for me a political and poetic gesture: it recovers the tactile dimension of the image and assumes that time and wear are also part of the work.
The experimental techniques I use are not a romantic return to the past, but a way of looking at it from the present: reviewing memory, honoring crafts, and deciding what to transform.
My work is built on that intersection between the analog and the contemporary, between the image and the thread, between the archive and the body. In that careful tension is where my work finds its voice.
Projects as a laboratory
My projects function as laboratories in which these techniques are intertwined: I do not think of them as isolated resources, but as a language that is built work by work.
I combine cyanotypes and embroidery, artist books, intervened photographs, unique pieces and installations. Sometimes the focus is on family memory and inheritance—material and emotional—; others, in the body that inhabits the territory, its marks and movements.
For me, experimental is letting the process transform the initial idea: letting chemistry, light, time and error also speak, assuming that I don’t control everything.
Experimental photography: between memory, body and light
My artistic practice is situated in a conversation between experimental photography and textile crafts. I am interested in how ancient photographic processes can become a deeply contemporary perspective.
I work with cyanotype, pinhole photography, solarigraphy, transfers and embroidery on paper and aerial. In dialogue with a context saturated with fast and disposable digital images, I choose slowness and direct contact with the materials
In my work, photography stops being just a record and becomes an object: the copy is not an end, but a starting point.
Ancient techniques, current questions
I am attracted to these techniques by their physical and ritual dimension: sensitizing the paper, preparing emulsions, exposing the image to the sun and accepting that light also decides. I seek to recontextualize these ancient processes to bring them into the territory of my contemporary questions.
I work on topics such as identity, migrations, grief and female memories. Stains, flaws and glazes become metaphors for what memory cannot name.
The cyanotype, with its deep blue, is for me an emotional space: sea, origin, what sinks and what returns. Solarigraphy and pinhole photography allow me to think about extended time: images that are built over weeks or months, where the imprint of the sun and the landscape accumulates in silence.
Embroider the image: the thread as writing
Embroidery appears in my work as a gesture of reconciliation with the past and with my own history. A technique associated with the feminine and the domestic sphere, with the slow time of the intimate, by incorporating it into photography I seek to question and revalue that knowledge.
When I embroider, the thread crosses the surface and turns it into a body: the resistance of the material and the tension of the gesture are part of the process. Each stitch is an act of attention and care.
Thus, the image is no longer fixed in the plane and expands towards the three-dimensional. The thread underlines, corrects or contradicts what the photograph shows, functioning as a second writing: a way of re-weaving stories.
@lucicalabrino.pintura
[email protected]
You may also be interested
by CONTENT NEWS
