Silvia Celeste Calcagno (1974, Genoa, Italy) lives and works in Albissola, Italy. Her artistic investigation focuses on the repetitive and obsessive actions captured by the photographic medium. By using a process of image perpetuation on stoneware where the print is corroded, the lightness of the shot is consumed: the final result is a reminiscent of old-fashioned, neo-romantic postcards.
Forget-me-not is a tribute to existence, to life; it is an act of gratitude.
The work is dedicated to her mother, who has forgotten the details and times of everyday life, but not the ability to cast her gaze. She has linked this event to the ephemeral nature of flowers, which, through their transience, tell the poetry of metamorphosis, moving from the peak of beauty to fading and eventually dying.
Imprinted in a snapshot on paper, which is then worked through thinners and enamels, fixed in a definitive material process, they become fragile presences.
The Myosotis (Forget-me-not), which gives the title to the series, is a small flower capable of iconographically conveying indissoluble bonds, a symbol of the persistence of memory. It enters a moment of autobiography characterized by the awareness of transience, thus becoming a subject of reflection on the very nature of existence, which, from being individual, becomes universal.
Agatha, sister of the Precog from Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), emerges from a tonal magma that reveals her fluid identity and precognitive capacity. A warrior and visionary, like a Joan of Arc lent to the contemporary world, Agatha proudly displays the signs of a metallic and metropolitan soul, becoming the androgynous mirror of a punk sentiment. Rebelling against the mechanical rules that harness society by sacrificing the most instinctive part of the individual to the detriment of a supposed order, she has faith only in a minority relationship that contains a denied truth. Like the heroine of an ancient tragedy, she stares at everyday evil, revealing a firm self-determining thought. A self-produced energy invests and transforms her, making her the muse and mute cry of the present. Enveloped by the restlessness that belongs to questions, Agatha floats in the universal that contains them, penetrating a secret that she herself knows does not exist, if not in the mind of man.
PRIS Basic Pleasure Model is a clear cinematic reference to the figure of Pris in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). The female figures represents replicants halfway between Cyberpunk and Science Fiction.
The replicants testify to a desire for existence that is not subordinated to everyday life. The desire of rebellion is expressed through a utopian genetic mutation that makes them "elaborate" from a photographic point of view, but also from a pictorial point of view. The implementation of "acid" colours accentuate their lack of belonging to reality. They are rebels against nature; rebels against the pictorial complexion and rebels to the cycle of life, and, for this reason, stronger and immortal. The price for this revolt is high: renouncing naturalness.
