Armida Gandini

What type of printing do you prefer?

I don’t have a pre-defined printing preference, but I carefully choose one type over another based on the project and the desired result. I think I’ve explored all, or almost all, of the printing options offered by NewLab, which I’ve been using for over twenty years… But for me, it’s never been primarily a matter of technical exploration.

What comes first, the idea or the fascination with the material? In other words, does the artistic-photographic project come first, or is it inspired by specific techniques or processes that strike you?

Entering your digital printing lab is like crossing the threshold of an amusement park: the machines, the papers, the fabrics, even the scraps capture my attention, triggering my thinking. However, for me, the idea comes before my fascination with the material. Technique is a tool that serves the thought process and the form my imagination shapes to arrive at the concrete work.

I enjoy experimenting and am fascinated by the potential of materials, but I’ve always chosen them based on the project, evaluating various possible uses. Of course, you need to be aware of your own capabilities… You can’t improvise. Moving from one material to another requires constantly challenging yourself, honing your skills by engaging with competent professionals with whom you can engage in a constructive and creative dialogue.

Do you have any Masters you look up to and feel close to?

Many Masters, male and female… This is precisely the case for using a capital M. In my journey, the theme of cultural heritage is fundamental; the memory of the past constitutes the fertile ground where our roots spread. I dedicated one project to the spiritual fathers and one to the mothers of culture, figures encountered in person or through their writings, their art, their actions, to whom I pay homage through simple gestures of gratitude, translated visually.

We may not be parents, but we cannot not be children (a free quote from Massimo Recalcati, one of my fathers). Although, as they themselves teach us, we must not forget that they are figures endowed with desire, with vital energy, but without depriving their heirs of an experience of freedom, risk, and self-affirmation…

Reading and inquiring about your work, I was pleased to discover how in the installation “Tasty and sweet -2018” the sculptural tears in Murano glass, presented as a slow process of sedimentation, had a direct connection with the reflections of R.Barthes, author of “Fragments of a love discourse”, an essay where tears are considered symbols of infinite continuity.

Curious how the aforementioned concepts (fragmentation and continuity) are not affected by mutual idiosyncrasy but, on the contrary, go pleasantly hand in hand, becoming a profitable combination that enriches our vision of the world.

A World already lovingly painted by Nature, as claimed by John Ruskin, art critic of the Victorian and Edwardian era, as well as one of the major theorists of the “Art & Crafts” movement; Nature from which we should take an example in Ethics and in all the arts, avoiding the idea of ​​progress assimilable to mere and obstinate industrialization.

He believed that careful and honest observation of natural forms, including plants, was essential for the artist to develop a deep understanding of the World and beauty.

It is therefore no coincidence that in your work “English Rose” you present the women in your life by associating them with the flowers that they themselves cultivated, expressing through the refinement of the forms the immense culture of these intellectuals, happily influenced by the typically English fascination for the landscape.

Gardeners, garden designers and landscape architects were Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville West, Virginia Woolf, but also Emily Brontë, inseparable from her moors or Jane Austen, who personally cultivated her garden.

All great writers who loved flowers and fruit plants, in their literary works as well as in their gardens.

These intellectuals, each enclosed in the silhouette of a plant or flower, compose a wall installation, an aesthetic and ethical map, which distils herbal treatments for the present from the elegance of a polite past.

Would you like to talk to me about what a thing, a person, an object, a film or a book or a suggestion must have that is special, unique or perhaps very banal to strike you to the point of thinking: “Yes, there is something here, from here there could be an Opera”?

As you rightly pointed out, I love working on pairs, opposites: earth and fantasy, nature and culture, The Bad Queen – The Good Queen (which is the title of a project of mine dedicated to Queen Adelaide of Burgundy), etc. It’s a very effective way to broaden one’s horizons and interpret the world from different perspectives. I’m very fond of Aristotle’s thought when he said: “Things do not appear the same to those who love and to those who hate, nor to those who are angry and to those who are calm, but rather they appear completely different or largely different.” Oscillating between two contradictory positions, without ever inhabiting one in particular, has always been a characteristic of my work.

That said, I’m convinced there are things, gestures, words, voices, images, colors, and who knows what else, that touch some of our chords—the most intimate, the deepest—making them vibrate. It’s not something planned or predictable, but something that happens and grows, working within us. Something that doesn’t pass with time because it has represented an important life experience in defining our identity. A bit like the teachers who, when you meet them, open you to new worlds, new journeys, new adventures, setting in motion tired parts of your body and parts of your soul that had been dormant. It happens and surprises you, activating mechanisms of creativity.

Future projects?

I’m at a point where I feel the need to refrain from starting new projects, even though the temptation is great! I have many series to organize, explore, and approach from new formal perspectives. I have two artist residencies planned for this spring, related to public and relational art. These, however, are special projects that will culminate with the work produced during the residency and the resulting exhibition.