Gianluca Balocco
- Italy
- Member since 2015
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
In the early 1980's I studied photographic techniques and based my artistic research around this medium. In those years I considered photography as a simple means to attain a painterly result. The "photo traces", for example, are photographic images transformed into pictorial and material compositions that derive from a still frame of cinematographic film. Photography became, in this research, a quick and cold way to replicate the eye and the mind in the moment in which they capture a spatial and temporal moment. In these works the photographic image is not printed with a traditional process of developing on paper, but is created with a cast in plaster from a plastic and metal mould. In these works, photography becomes a simple material trace made of plaster, wool, and paper. In the 1990's my personal research in photography and video opened a new and important chapter exploring the mind of individuals: photographing the mind as a container of the collective memory. Our thoughts derive from images and translate into emotive and mnemonic states common to all. Fixed images of groups of people create a link between the external photographic vision and the internal mental image of each person who makes up a group. Travelling without a Passport is inspired by Bionian theories about the relationship between memory and emotions. In 1993 I presented the results of my work in the XLV Biennale di Venezia as a photography and video installation. The work evolved from a three-month study of a group of 20 long-term female patients in a psychiatric hospital. A few years later I created a similar work with a group of poets who I met through the Modern Art Museum of Marseille. Some of my most important exhibits of the 1990's were in the following museums and galleries: The Contemporary Art Museum of Umbertide, "Mystery and Myth" in the Fukuyama Museum of Art, Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art, and The Museum of Art - Kockhi, Ilda City Museum, "Five Rooms between Art and Depression (A.Bonito Oliva) at Museo Correr Venezia. In 1995, in collaboration with a group of psychoanalists, I began researching photographic images as mental objects of a "collective thought". In 1996, I studied the theories of Wilfred Bion e di Gerald Edelmann, and participated in several national conferences of psychoanalists. In 1997 I was invited to create an installation at the Lingotto di Torino for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bion. In the 1990s I directed the following short films: The Tube (1994), Poets don't cast shadows (1995), Brain Beat (1995), Rapid Eye Movements (1996), Twenty Five Thousand Days (1996), and October (1997).
GIANLUCA BALOCCO
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