Lorena Florio (Pescara, 1996) is an Italian visual artist based in Berlin. After studying New media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan (Italy), she started a visual research where the image is considered as a surface to generate connections and non-predefined paths. Her work has been published in numerous publications, both in print and digital formats, including Yogurt Magazine, Phroom Platform, Artoday, and L’essenziale Studio journal, as well as has been showcased in several group exhibitions. In 2022, she was among the finalists of the eleventh edition of the Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Arts, presenting the artwork Altalena from the Essere per sempre work.
Lorena Florio’s research explores the passing of time, the continuous metamorphosis of the body and matter, and the nature of memories and memory. The latter, for her, is an interweaving of images, sensations, smells and sounds that are deposited in the unconscious, emerging through fleeting flashes of evocative images.
The images represent fragments of memory that, overlapping, are decoded and recomposed into new forms. Through experimentation with various media and both digital and physical manipulation of the pictures, she generates photographs that transcend the boundaries of the classic way of presenting images, taking the form of sculptures that fit into physical space.
The series Essere per sempre (2021 – ongoing), presented in our Open Call, explores the theme of the body and its transformative energy in relation to space and time. Parts of the work often focus on childhood memories and obvious phases of bodily change and growth, as in the case of Loosing teeth.
By capturing bodies layered at different angles, Lorena challenges our perception and questions our ability to comprehend the energy contained in bodies in its totality. Her images act as fossils, preserving this power over time and escaping decay. The sculptures’ contorted poses create new organic visions.
Gaia Amorello (GA): Hello Lorena, welcome to this section dedicated to the shortlisted authors from the Open Call. First of all, congratulations for being selected with your project and thank you for participating!
Can you tell us how you got into photography and how you have continued to deepen your visual research?
Lorena Florio (LF): I started photography in my early teens. There was no sparking event, but it happened very naturally instinctively. I have always observed reality a lot, especially people and all their details, which always changes. In the beginning, during high school, my photographs were related to the decisive moment: I would leave the house and photograph people and places I encountered along the way. The first and only photographic work related, so to speak, to a more classical and documentary photography was the series about my father, who previously worked as a night courier, every night. Unconsciously, I have always observed all the changes, both physical and mental, that this work caused him and therefore I decided to document it. A short while ago I looked through this work again, and I noticed that for the most part I photographed details of both the places I travelled to and my father’s body. Thinking about it now, therefore, I have always had a propensity towards details and things seen from a very close viewpoint and never towards a wider and more defined view of reality. Over the years and especially during my last year at the Brera Academy, I started to think a lot about the image, about what it can become if it is always pushed a little beyond its boundaries, breaking away almost completely from the photography that is closely linked to the crucial moment and the telling of specific stories through images. After shooting a picture I would ask myself “OK, what now?” and it was on that “now” that I started to work. I was shooting a lot less and this initially worried me a little, but the thought was always there, always present. So I started experimenting, working and questioning more and more the details I decided to photograph, for example as I did with the work Lacerazioni. Then I started creating connections, with all these details, which in the meantime have become moments related to a confused memory, elusive and sharp at the same time because they were produced during childhood.
(GA): You are from Pescara (Italy) but you moved to Berlin. How has this relocation impacted your photographic journey?
(LF): Moving to Berlin was somewhat forced and due to various needs, both art-related and also, and especially, economic needs. After studying at Brera Academy of fine arts in Milan, I stayed for a while in Pescara (during the pandemic) and then moved to Rome. After a year, I was no longer stimulated by anything and felt I was in the wrong place. This change was one of the best decisions I made in the last few years, even though it was very difficult and still is, I have the possibility to continue working on my research without having too much stress. I have met many artists and people with whom I can compare myself. I can say that Berlin has had an absolutely positive influence and the move was necessary with regard to my work, as I also had the opportunity to produce in a temporary studio.
(GA): In your artistic practice you demonstrate a keen focus to the manipulation of photography, both in the subject of the image which often is the human body or its parts, and in the medium used for expressing your work. How does your creative process take place, whether digital or analogue?
(LF): At the heart of my research is a constant experimentation and interrogation of the image in relation to paper and recently also other textiles. The work Lacerazioni was the starting point of my research where the image is processed through analogue and digital phases. Even though this experimentation had already started very slowly during my last year at Brera. I then began to think of the image as a fossil, as an object containing a specific amount of energy that is expressed through a composition of bodies, and various moments relating to childhood. Recently I was reading about Claudio Parmiggiani’s work and there was a reference to Lacan’s reasoning that identifies memory as a stratification of images, smells, impressions, undefined sounds, as if they were a tangle of the unconscious. I found myself very much in this reasoning, as I conceive the image and the whole work in this same way. I can no longer have a completely clear view of reality and it is through this filter that I elaborate and process images.
(GA): Your research focuses on the processes of mutation and conservation of body and matter’s energy and your practice consists in constantly feeding your personal archive with images and then retrieving and re-signifying them. Can you explain which is the direction of your research and how these themes intersect with each other?
(LF): Sections of the work often focus on parts of the body that are visibly changing, as for example in Loosing teeth, while others do not, even though all surfaces, bodily and non-bodily, are changing day by day. Some of the images used have been somewhat constructed and programmed, while for the others the selection is made from a large archive of images that will never cease to be updated, as I have always photographed family events and my nephews growing up. Recently the work has been shifting more in the latter direction, in the sense that not all the photographs I choose to use have been made with the purpose of being used in the work.
(GA): In Lacerazioni (2020) the energy of light beams lacerates portions of bodies. What do the lacerations represent to you?
(LF): Lacerazioni, being the first work developed after the Academy, is very important to me. It represents a breaking point with my past, in a photographic sense. Developed during the first lockdown due to the pandemic, it is a work whose aesthetic is closely linked to the demands of that particular period. Being locked in a small flat with my parents in Pescara, the things and spaces I had at my disposal were very limited and reality no longer fascinated me. I could no longer identify myself with the concept of photographic narrative, so with the few tools I had at my disposal I started to experiment. The rips can be seen from several points of view. Light passing through these rips irrupts into the photographic surface, disrupting a normal view of the photograph, generating a new dimension. Everyone can see what they want in the rips, as far as I am concerned there is no specific meaning.
With this work, in some way I wanted to challenge the tools that everyone generally has, such as a simple printer and ordinary paper (not photographic paper) and above all by structuring the entire work around a very simple action such as observing the rays of sun passing through a slit. Watching the sun’s rays through my hands was an action that fascinated me during my childhood.
(GA): In your latest work Essere per sempre (2021 – on going), submitted as a project proposal for the Pellicola + Mucho Mas! Open Call, instead of being emanated and transferred by light, energy is preserved and frozen, thanks to photography, in the pose of the bodies, thus escaping the transformation caused by the passage of time. How did the project start and how does it relate to Lacerazioni?
(LF): What I consider the first phase of Essere per sempre began thanks to a residency in Rome (Garbatella Images – Body – curated by Sara Alberani, Francesco Rombaldi and Francesco Zizola) in which I had to reflect on the theme of the body in relation to a specific area of Rome. I had already started to process the images as in Essere per sempre, photographing parts of the body and giving them a three-dimensionality in which, somehow, light was always present. During the residency, I created an overlay of faces, eyes and other body parts of people who had imprinted their presence in that neighbourhood. The shapes I produced, recalling organic forms, seemed to have a life and energy of their own. Hence, I began to conceive the images as fossils, as objects that contained a specific portion of energy that had passed away. After the residency, I continued to work based on a type of individual and often childhood-related memory, as also in Lacerazioni.
Instead of creating overlaps, I started by removing parts of the image on the same photograph and generating a synthesis, just like in the work Altalena.
Lacerazioni and Essere per sempre although they are two visually very different works, are the evolution of each other. They are therefore closely related. In general, I don’t like to categorically divide my works, because I consider them to be integral parts of the same research. Lacerazioni has a very precise type of aesthetic, but in my opinion, that does not mean it has to considered something completely different from Essere per sempre.
(GA): You expressed an intention to transcend the traditional presentation of images in a book format and contemplated the idea of turning them into sculpture. What prompted this idea and what other extensions do you envision for your project?
(LF): Until now, the objects I produced were always rephotographed, so the final work always consisted of a two-dimensional image. I made a small publication with Lacerazioni, but if I were to think about working on the book form now, I would do it in a completely different way. Right now I would probably find myself quite constrained in the classic book format. The work in general is moving more and more towards a three-dimensional and therefore sculptural form. I like the fact that I generate other forms beyond the classic photographic formats because they are closer to the way I visualise images in my mind. All the places I’ve seen and moments I’ve experienced are kind of crumpled up and placed one on top of the other in my mind, nothing is clear. What I am trying to do now is to give physical form to all this.
(GA): The theme of the image, and in this case, of the body, starts its relationship within a space. How does Essere per sempre relate to digital and physical space? What do these types of spaces represent for you?
(LF): I think that the alternation between real space – which means the thing I photograph at a given time and in a given place – digital space and then the transposition into a physical space, it is one of the characterising parts of the work. In the sense that all these processes and steps define the work, changing it more and more into something else while still having the same nature.
In digital space I can generate many things but the image always remains there, still. In physical space, the image can extend and generate other connections.
(GA): Pellicola Magazine and Mucho Mas! selected your work to spark an encounter and a discussion on transformation, not only of the image but also related to its extension into space. What are your expectations related to this encounter?
(LF): I finally had the opportunity to think about my work in relation to a form that will not only be re-photographed but will also relate to a physical space. I can say that as I am still working, I don’t really know what to expect yet, but I believe that from here on the work will take a different path and this intrigues me and frightens me at the same time.
