Arles OFF 2015 : Laure Vasconi & Salvatore Puglia at Sit Down Gallery

From Cairo to Rome, from Hollywood to Babelsberg, from Paramount to Fox, Laure Vasconi has strolled, roamed, wandered, and dreamed- always armed by her articial limb, her camera. In more or less dormant or abandoned studios, she has observed the backstage of twentieth century dream factories, capturing the upside-down and inside-out : the unconscious cinéma taking place behind the silver screen.
In the most deserted locations, sometimes occupied by just a few employees, invisible ants indispensable to the great hive that is Cinema, Laure continues to photograph what the crowds never see: the gaps in the film, the moments in between the shoots, the before and after of the manufacturing process. Empty warehouses, trestles, chair rails, machinery, locker rooms, cupboards, drawers, costumes, wigs and mannequins form a world engulfed by a dark labyrinth, an amniotic fluid of movie life which is always invisible from public view. Geologist, speleologist, cinema explorer, Laure Vasconi creates an eloquent work: revealing the hidden depths of the largest dream machine of the last one hundred and twenty years. 120 years is old, and it’s also a venerable age, a slow agony that the photographer can record, revealing the last traces of an art and a world of “home made industry” which is now in the process of being submerged by the digital era.
Documenting these behind-the- scenes of a changing art is also akin to producing a genre of still-image film, it prolongs the magic of cinema and its evocative power: such is the paradoxical art of Laure Vasconi, such is the spell-binding beauty of her film studio series.

“In the early 80s I worked as a researcher at the department of Historical Archives in Rome. But I felt restricted and my quest for a given truth was already declining. I discovered little pieces of paper in the files of the XVIII and XIX century, often scrap paper used to wipe the pens of the scribes; I created collages and watercolors that I sent to my friend Rodolphe Burger, who at the time taught philosophy in Alsace. Unknown to me, Rudolph was collecting these works and when he felt he had enough, he began to solicit galleries. One day in the summer of 1985 he informed me that I was going to have an exhibition at Gallerie Adeas in Strasbourg. I took a train (at the time there was still night trains crossing Europe) and arrived at Strasbourg train station early one morning. Rodolphe was waiting for me on the platform, accompanied by Philippe Poirier. They accompanied me for breakfast at the only bistro open at six in the morning, Cafè Italia. On the glass door, the sight of a poster struck me like a blow: Salvatore Puglia, exhibition, Falsapartenza.
For one week Philippe, who did not know me before, helped me hang this first exhibition, after which I took the courage to leave my job and my country to see if I was capable of “something else”.
Rudolph and Philippe who were among the friends who welcomed me on my arrival in Paris, are now the reason I am in Arles, as an artist, in 2015. Everything you see in this exhibition, Inventaire, is their doing.”

Salvatore Puglia