Devenance – The Body as Threshold
DEVENANCE is a photographic crossing in which the body becomes a place of passage, tension and transformation.
Born from the dialogue between Clelia Claire Baldo and Piero Viti within LABOTIV, this work has developed over the years as a living cycle, rather than as a simple gathering of series. ECHO, TRANSMORPH, VERENA’S DANCE, FATICA and DIPTYCH form the successive states of one continuous movement: apparition, trace, gesture, burn, resonance.
At the heart of this research lies the form of the diptych, essential to several bodies of work. It extends the very nature of LABOTIV: two gazes, two times, two states of a presence. The diptych does not function as repetition, but as an echo chamber. One image holds, the other shifts; one anchors the figure, the other makes it waver. Between the two, a fragile zone opens, where the body continues to vibrate, to double itself, to become.
The body is not approached as an identity to be fixed. It becomes threshold, sensitive matter, a traversed surface. Light does not merely illuminate the figures: it passes through them, alters them, sometimes reveals them at the edge of their own disappearance. In this space of darkness, forms emerge, fragment or withdraw, as if the visible itself were seeking its own transformation.
LABOTIV does not photograph the body as a certainty, but as a presence in becoming. Each image approaches a fragile instant: the moment when form slightly comes undone, when gesture leaves a trace, when density becomes breath, when something takes place between flesh and image.
DEVENANCE is therefore less a linear narrative than a slow alchemy: from night to clarity, from matter to vibration, from effort to a more silent form of presence.
This crossing has given rise to an artist’s book published by Éditions Corridor Éléphant in 2026.
https://labotiv.com
Book
https://www.corridorelephant.com/product-page/devenance-un-livre-de-labotiv
