Little by little we subtract Faith and fallacy from fact, the illusory from the true and then starve upon the residue.
Samuel Hoffenstein

“Do you see my head?” In 1976, when Francesca Woodman, at the age of just 16, asked the technician to remove her head from the scene, she had already understood the process: the artist/performer has to be blurred in the viewfinder, disappearing and then appearing. The naked body, stigmatized by visual effects of simultaneity, shadows and movements, highlights its own fragility in its fragmentation and dissection.
The technique of creating a self-portrait by using one’s body as the raw material has been used by many artists, from the earliest videos created by Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, in the early years of their careers in the late 1960s, and the methods used by artists and performers who, in the following decade, used self-representation as a method of expressing protest as well as inner pain. Examples include Gina Pane and Marina Abramovic.
Silvia Calcagno has also decided to “use herself” as a subject, not so much for the narcissistic pleasure of elevating her Ego – a trap that many fall into – but rather in order to have greater control of the actions that she puts on stage. Her ambition is not that of talking about herself, she is not really interested in this. Her subjects are depictions of emotive states, in which presence is achieved through absence, space can be found in volume, and life is constantly alternated with a profound sense of death. The contrast of opposites.
The body is at the centre: fixed camera, repeated actions, almost an obsession that can last hours, or days. The result is literally a wall consisting of hundreds of images, all very similar, differing only in the space of a breath. Silvia Calcagno defines them as “realizations,” in a way analogous to Gina Pane who considered the work as being the photographic documentation and not the actual performance itself, in other words the “constat photographique.” Silvia Calcagno’s work is then followed by a process in which the image is fixed onto fireclay tiles, on which the image is corroded and consumed, compressing the lightness of the original shot into the final result that resembles period, neo-romantic postcards.
The movement that appears in each frame, when considered overall, forms a photographic sequence that recalls the studies from the book “Animal Locomotion” by Eadweard Muybridge who, in 1887, was more successful amongst the voyeuristic general public than with the scientific community to which his work should have been destined. The development of the ceramic panels on the walls, and the series of photographs, suggests a movement that is on a plane above that of isolated photograms. Overall, the narrative becomes more complex, and it is defined by means of mini-videos and audio components that accompany and complete the picture. Silvia Calcagno’s creativity is scientific and not bucolic. She lives in Albissola, historic centre for Italian ceramics. She has considerable experience as a professional ceramic artist, and she has acquired a masterly technique which she uses to implement her own unusual form of creation. She treats the fireclay with glazes and slips, and then transfers the image onto the material by means of an alchemical principle of photo transfer at very high temperatures.

Thursday, any Thursday, all possible Thursdays. That exact day, the same as many others. Same place, same actress, same wait. Fruitless. The chair remains empty. The sense of incompleteness and loneliness is heightened by a self-centred interchange, syncopated sentences in a repetitive loop pronounced by a single broadcast voice. Just as “The Artist is the Present” (MoMA, 2010) in which Marina Abramovic, in red, blue and white, was there, seven hours a day for three months, searching for something in spectators’ eyes, for some sort of reassurance in the face of who knows what turmoil. The present, those seconds or minutes spent observing the artist, seated in front of her in silence, expanded into moments that seemed eternal.
The theme appears in the video Wait by Silvia Calcagno, in which she is lost amongst an indefinite number of sleeping, fluctuating Ophelias. The last performance of white swans, after which there is just the spotlight on an empty stage. Lou Reed would sing “Goodbye Ladies.”
There is none of the romanticism of pre-Raphaelite imagery, such as in photographs by Justine Kurland that contain references to late 19th century English landscape painting in which attractive women dance or sleep like Venuses of the waters, amidst wide-angle visions of uncontaminated nature. In this case, the choice of iconography is closer to the drama of the Dead Christ by Mantegna, at the Brera Gallery. The perspective concentration of the composition enhances the gravity of the wake, with feet and hands brought to the foreground by virtue of the visual composition’s illusionistic vortex.
Silvia Calcagno’s sacrificial virgin is Hilaria, blurred and faceless, as in many of the compositions by Francesca Woodman; she is one, no-one, and a hundred thousand, young women. The fact that the title identifies a character creates a contradiction with the impersonalization formed by absence of expression. The same is true for the dematerialization of the long-shutter-speed shots in From icon to icon and Myclone. The model, artist and director, moves in front of the camera, shakes her head, and parcelizes her body in order to attain a suitable visual effect.
The relationship with suffering and death is visceral and closely linked to performance, just as in Marina Abramovic and Gina Pane. The evident necessity of demonstrating female identity goes hand in hand with denouncing the taboos associated with the “weaker sex.” Within the aesthetic appeal is contained all the power that implodes, in the impotence of a sterile, conservative and dated demarcation of differences between male and female.
In a show curated by Francesco Bonami, who brought together a considerable number of international artists with an openly political stance, the provocative quotation of the exhibition title, “Don’t touch the white woman,” demolished a prohibition imposed by an incidental domination, opening the path towards the acceptance of contradiction and debate between the two sexes. Female identity as a symbol of conquest.
Recalling photographer Marta Maria Pérez Bravo, Silvia Calcagno develops femininity and the performance action ahead of the environmental installation of photographs and ceramics, as if it were a ritual without any ambitions for expressly-formulated aesthetic design.
In this way, the sensuality transmitted by the shape of a mouth seen very close up, deformed (the title Stare can be translated as Being) by the hands of another actor, directs erotic attention towards a perverse, artificial excitation. “The sex appeal of the inorganic” (Mario Perniola, 1994) is not concerned with beauty, but with the sadistic, masochistic use of the body in the guise of machines whose virtual potential can be abused without any filters. This work expresses a degenerate form of communication, the impossibility of any reaction, the passive condition of a dialogue for a single actor.

Silvia Calcagno does not like the monumentalization of art, at least not in the sense of a visual approach popular in the 1980s, that of enlarging an image in order to create a direct clash with the public. Her tiles survive independently in the intimacy of a format frequently used by artists in the 1970s, for example Francesca Woodman, the 18×23 cm pieces made by Cindy Sherman early in her career, and the 28×18 cm works by Ana Mendieta. This visual format returned in the 1990s and has continued ever since: micro-stories of everyday life, in contrast with the spectacular approach preferred by the “Sensation Generation.”
But it is technique that places Silvia’s works into an experimental dimension, amplifying the power of the medium. The use of photography is a pretext, the realization of a final result that transforms the initial image into its archetype. The transfer to fireclay at 1,250 degrees saturates contrast and bleaches the luminosity of blacks and white. The process resembles digital alterations of the chromatic curves, and a development of material forms. The process is a solution to the equation of crafts and contemporary aesthetics. Experimental photo-ceramics, a skilled procedure in which the result is unique; the technique could never be used to create a numbered edition, differently to photography which can be duplicated infinitely. The image can be repeated, but each copy has an unpredictable appearance, different to the degree of 70% of the original (as specified in copyright law). Technical methods of avoiding the “reproducibility of a work of art” (Walter Benjamin, 1955) and the idea of a “copy” in its literal sense are important concepts amongst the artists of yBa, those in the Saatchi stable. Mat Collishaw achieved success applying the same rule adopted by Silvia Calcagno: impressions of images on many ceramic tiles that parcelize the image, as in paintings by Chuck Close, in an incalculable number of pixels, just as in digital photography. Iconic archaeology is contaminated by the aesthetics imposed by contemporary media, and a crafts technique becomes the method of preserving the category of artistic uniqueness.
Luca Beatrice