Interview by Claudia Bigongiari
All Images © Lívia Melzi
In partnership with Paris Photo 2024 which will take place from 07 to 10 November 2024 at the Grand Palais in Paris, we have the pleasure to interview the artist Lívia Melzi, exhibited inside the Emergence sector.
Born in 1985 in Brazil, Lívia Melzi lives and works between Paris and São Paulo. She offers a visual investigation about the Western representation of Brazil, examining arguments such as identity, archive and memory.
After studying oceanography in Brazil, she graduated with a Master’s degree in Photography and Contemporary Art at the University Paris VIII, and joined the doctoral programme in art and literature at the University of Zurich.
In 2021, she exhibited her work at the 65th Salon de Montrouge, where she won the Grand Prix, as well as at the Rencontres Photographiques du 10ème arrondissement, at the Festival Image Satellite (Nice) and at FUNARTE (Brasília).
In 2022, she took part in the emerging European photography exhibition Circulation(s), at the Athens Photography Festival, at Palais de Tokyo (Paris) with the exhibition Tupi or not Tupi. The same year, Lívia Melzi was awarded with a grant for research and creation from the Lille Institute for Photography and benefited from the LABVERDE artistic residency in the Brazilian Amazon. She is represented by Salon /H Gallery
Claudia Bigongiari (CB): Native from Brazil, your artistic practice consists in memory and archive’ s representation and documentation, focusing on the Western representation of Brazilian culture and history. Tell us something about how and when you started this photographic research, especially coming from a background of oceanographic studies.
Lívia Melzi (LM): I had my first camera when I was 8. So photography was with me all the time, at the beginning in a very vernacular and familiar way. Then, when I was studying oceanography, I started working with a ROV, a robot that goes deep under water to collect images and videos of the ocean. The image became part of my work as oceanographer and I decided afterwards to try photography when I was already 28. I don’t have any art background, I’ve always been in physics and mathematics but I think image came at some point when I started using them for science. When I think about my background and my work today, this heritage its very clear, with images that crosses (and questions) our relationship with archives, documents and an idea of trust and reality.
(CB): Archives and their usual location, museums, make conservation and circulation of images and documents which then become more trustable and reliable sources of knowledge.
Your projects mixes archive’s materials and your photographic productions, that you define “représentations quasidocumentaires (almost documents)”, why is that so? what visual results do you want to achieve?
(LM): I think it’s interesting that we still have this relationship with archives and documents as something “trustable” because there is a large bibliography (western or not) explaining how this “trust” was made and still is. I like to think about museums and archives (as we know them) as open spaces to think about the truth. Or more precisely : that is just one way, among hundreds of others, to conserve and circulate information. It’s JUST the Western way to think.
Maybe that’s why I talk about “almost documents”, because I’m suspicious of images. My photographs reproduce a hard, frontal aesthetic, linked to an idea of sharpness and truth in relation to the object being photographed, but when my camera mimics that gesture of such direct visual information (sometimes more direct than the document itself that I’m photographing), I want to create a place of doubt. Nothing can be that real, or that reliable, and we know it’s not.
For example, when I was still doing my master’s in photography I started frequenting the National Library in Paris and finding a lot of visual archives, a corpus of images made by europeans, from the XVIII and XIX century, that in some way, was a founding visual base of identity in Brazil. Today, we know that these “fundamental images” were made in a very specific context of Colonisation, where the other voices have been silenced. The fact that they still have this sacred status of documents is even more interesting to me.
So I think this was the moment when archive and image, not photography, but image in general, became a big subject in my mind. And fiction as well : when we see these images we are talking more about Europe than about Brazil, my work has become a sort of mirror of the European regard.
(CB): One of the projects we are very curious about is L’ordre des choses (2023) which is the result of one month of residency together with the photographer Emilio Azevedo inside the Frans Krajcberg Center of Contemporary Art. You had to confront yourself inside a space full of elements: the archive of the sculptor which reproduces the resilience of Amazonian Nature; the glass architecture which ensures a positive environment for the amazonian plants… How did you approach to all these elements and developed your images?
(LM): I was very glad to work with Emilio (Azevedo) whose work is very close to mine and I think we look at the world in the same way, but not by the same angle. We also invited Laila Melchior, a Brazilian curator, to work with us. And it was an amazing experience. She helped us build our vision and our thinking, to give a structure to our ideas and questions.
So, during this month of residency we started looking to the images made by Krajcberg in Brazil. We were very interested in how this Polish man, full of traumas of war, had a careful and curious way to look at Brazilian nature. His archives are full of projection of his personal history and we can see this through the elements he photographed : fire, death, destruction (of nature). Something far from the idealised idea of nature that must be virgin and that we must “save”.
With Emilio we decided to make the same movement in Paris, using photography, by photographing some elements (objets or social spaces) that are connected with the construction of a certain imaginary.
We played with the meaning of document and truth by choosing to work with a large format camera, because of its potential technique of producing negatives full of informations.
In some way, the results are something very close to what we call “reality”.
Glass came to be a very important element of our work, connected with photography itself, present in Krajcberg Atelier and very important in the history of circulation of plants, from tropical territories to places like Paris. We had long hours of discussion during the residence to think when and how to use this element and in the end it because our scenography. The support of the images.
Emilio Azevedo (EA): In this project, we aimed to explore spaces, subjects, and a photographic approach that suggests a desire for control over reality, a hallmark of naturalism. Working within greenhouses and botanical gardens evokes a certain fantasy of objectivity and control often associated with scientific positivism. Each square inch of these environments seems to imply that the world is not only understandable but also logical, potentially reducible to our epistemological frameworks.
We approached photography with a literal and frontal perspective, leading it towards a tautological dimension, where each image acts as a redundant argument.
Using a large-format camera, as Livia mentioned, allowed us to engage with the desire for a supposed stable and ordered truth in documentation. But, the abundance of information produced by this camera, the ability to zoom on details and endlessly explore the surface of the world, prompts us to question what these images truly reveal about the subject or phenomenon being photographed. The closer we examine them, the less clarity we seem to achieve; the more we present, the less is perceived.This approach leads us to a kind of abstraction through an excess of realism. In this sense, rather than providing insights about the photographed subjects, these images offer a glimpse into the underlying framework of thought and the technical aspects that make them possible. It’s a way to dive headfirst into what could be described as a doctrine and mystique of positivism, inviting further reflection on the relationship between representation and understanding.
(CB): L’ordre des choses analyses the inner aspects of photography (the element of glass and light you used in the exhibition and part of the space itself are representative of that). Which images did you choose and produce? And also which ones did you collect from the center’s archive?
(LM): As a matter of time we decided to look into Paris, looking for which symbols of Brazil or idea of Brazil was circulating there. We searched for tapestries, feather ornaments, some paintings in Louvre. Every week we were going to a different place to try to understand how we could find an idea of Nature, Brazil, the Amazon forest. I think we were doing a projection too. trying to decipher as europeans think about Brazil in a rather quick and clichéd way.
The Botanical Garden was the place we decided to use as a “base” to create a narrative. The glass and the tropical plants made a connection with the space of the residency.
We also showed some of the Krajcberg’s photographic archives. We chose slightly ambiguous images he produced in Brazil, about nature, especially a small series of someone building a big fire inside the forest. They are very poetic images which leave space for various interpretations.
(CB): The images are not exhibited in the traditional way (framed prints on the wall) but they are installed on glass structures in the middle of the rooms, and sometimes left in the form of slides and films (their raw state) awaiting to be developed. Is this a sort of provocation against the museum world where the glass was the first filter towards knowledge?
(LM): The glass structures are some recovered material that we found, as Krajcberg was collecting wood, pigments and other nature elements from the forest to make his work, we were doing the same gesture.
It represents an extension of the local architecture itself (Krajcberg’s atelier), but also of colonial botanical architecture with tropical gardens. Glass can be a symbol of power because is generally used to protect something. In the camera, it filters the light. Museums use the glass to protect the documents and that imposes a distance between the public and the object, at the same time it makes the object sacred.
The idea was to use the glass as a support for the images, without protection, without distance. The positives were fixed on the glass with a very simple tape, and people, without even realising it, could touch or even steal the pieces. They weren’t protected. And this was a provocation too. A sort of invisible pact with the public who have this relationship of respect with the objects in front of them in an exhibition.
(EA): Our interest in glass also arises from its connection to science—its inherent transparency often suggests that scientists operate from a neutral and clear vantage point. However, this idea often hides the disruptions that constantly challenge this supposed natural order. Such disturbances include the body, the environment, transitional spaces… These interference recede into a kind of blind spot; it seems as if scientists feel compelled to overlook the foundations and arbitrariness of their own conceptual frameworks in order to conduct their experiments successfully. In this context, glass also reflects the sanitised version of reality found in the laboratory.
Moreover, glass serves as a pertinent material for exploring the scaffolding of scientific objectivity that underpins certain interpretations of nature. It also plays a crucial role in photography, where the lens is referred to as the “objectif” in French, highlighting the medium’s historical association with impartiality. This prompts us to consider the role of photography in the ongoing project of visual and social ordering, which began in the Renaissance with optical geometry and the quest for a clear, rational perspective of the world.
(CB): There is of course a discourse around Nature and naturalism, continuing the research of the sculptor Frans Krajcberg, maybe one of the first activists for the preservation of the planet. What is your relationship with the representation of Nature (even if you previous works were more centred to human aspects)? Is L’ordre des choses also related with the actual situation of climate crisis?
(LM): Frans Krajcberg moved to Brazil, in the middle of the forest, after surviving the Second World War. He lost all his family which was Jewish. So he arrived in the forest after this tragedy and that’s why, in my opinion, he was so obsessed with the destruction, the fire, the death and with the idea of preserving something. But at the same time, as I said before, he arrived in Brazil with his European vision, and his projection in the Brazilian nature of something pure, virgin and sacred which we can’t get close to because it’s something separated from us.
Our questions were : how can we think about nature being part of nature? How can we look at these images made by Europeans? And how can we make some new images today? Since the beginning of Colonialism Brazil was the perfect territory for European’s projections. Like the myth of the Savage, which actually we don’t know what it is. Nature, the Amazon forest, is something very aggressive, very difficult to understand. There is once again a gap where we can put a lot of questions about culture and about how we consider nature exactly. This was our big subject during the residency, how Nature and its symbols are seen in Paris or in any city in the world, and how we use these symbols to keep building our imagination, our idea of it, as it something different from us.
(EA): Krajcberg was, in many respects, ahead of his time, aiming to transcend conventional tropes by embracing a more nuanced understanding of nature. However, despite his deep engagement with environmental issues, his vision of nature sometimes reflects a somewhat romanticised perspective.
In our case, Livia and I have built our work on the understanding that traditional representations of nature, shaped by colonial perspectives, often foster a sense of detachment, portraying nature as an exotic other rather than as something we are intrinsically part of. This disconnection can contribute to a lack of accountability for ecological destruction. Furthermore, we recognise that the impact of art in promoting ecological awareness is often limited. Therefore, we believe that establishing a complex relationship with the presentation and representation of the world may be one of the most significant actions we can undertake, while adopting an ethical approach in art and creation that avoids predatory relationships and extractivism.
(CB): Among the images there are some feather artefacts which resemble miniatures of the feather cloaks of Tupinamba tribes (one of your research from 2019). They aren’t really made by Amazonian people but they are just some reproductions made from the documentations and archive at our disposal. That opens a very deep doubt on what we see and what we are made to see. What is your position about this?
(LM): I met this French guy four or five years ago and I told Emilio that we had go with the camera and take some pictures at the guy’s house because it could bring very powerful thoughts.
In fact that house creates a weird combination of elements: the feathers that connect with the idea of nature of the other one, the Brazilians; then we can see some very Western pieces like the table Louis XIV, even the IKEA’s furnitures everywhere. This meeting of elements generates a lot of strangeness for various reasons.
He’s doing reproductions, fake pieces, just by watching videos on YouTube and photographs. He now uses some techniques that already disappeared in Brazil, he’s the only one who knows it and that is very weird because he’s a white and unknown guy who knows something that even the people who invented it don’t know anymore.
Avoiding every kind of feeling or obsession related to his practice, we wanted just to analyse how informations and images related to the amazon forest circulate, making someone, who’s never been there, able to create these artefacts, which are very realistic and real.
He doesn’t show the feather pieces to anyone, he’s not selling them, it is only an exercise that this guy is doing with his ghosts. And for me, he represents the perfect example to think about the relationship between France and Brazil. The projections we have of each other.
(CB): Something that you explored a lot in your research about the Tupinamba cloaks, is the relationship between the European museums and Brazilian artefacts. With what purpose do you think the Institutions want to share and transmit this cultural heritage ? And why, if there is, the necessity of filter some informations?
(LM): I used to think about museums as unchangeable structures, something that represented a very heavy colonial legacy. I think I’m rebuilding my own relationship with this institution while doing my new project, in the National Museum of Brazil, destroyed by fire in 2018. While I was photographing the pieces that came out of the fire, I was able to witness the researchers’ complex relationship with these objects. There is a huge effort to keep traces of that place without reproducing the same exclusionary discourses that underpins the idea of a museum.
Maybe I have a controversial opinion about “decolonizing a museum” because I don’t believe it’s possible. In order to decolonize a museum we have to end it and that’s not going to happen. Even with the restitutions, even with donations, even with the “correct” information about every single object.. because the genesis of its creation is built on a relationship of force, between the idea of the self and the other. And then we can think about why the are filters. So, for me, the only possible question is not about “why they want to share”, but how they will do it and with whom. And we need to think about images too because the “musée imaginaire” of Malraux is shaping our experience with the objets through images. Maybe we don’t need to see the real objets anymore, once they will be protected behind a wall. In the end, for me, we are always looking at an image, something frozen in time, of which we can have no other experience than that of sight.
