ET FIAT LUX

The entire project consists of:
7 photographs (still unpublished), from the series Mise en scène (2020-21)
7 photographs from the series The fold (2019)
Unveiling the Veiled: (TESLA) Installation, variable dimensions (2017-18)
8 photographs from the series After Et fiat lux (2017-18)
9 photographs from the series Et fiat lux (2016-17)
9 photographs from the series Fuscum subnigrum (2013)

(ANG)

In her works, Spela Volcic highlights two fundamental questions concerning not only the essence of photography that she uses besides installation but more generally the nature and the making of art: reproduction and fiction.
In art just as in life, every single production is re-production.
Nothing stems from nothing, and everything is generated from the reproduction of something. Photography – that was invented in the 19th Century, in the so-called machine age, evolved through the 20th Century and transformed in the present era of digital technology – reproduces not only the world but also itself, for its identity is contained in the very concept of reproduction.
In this complex research, Spela Volcic uses photography to reproduce artificial flowers which, in turn, are reproduced.
We are presented with two passages: the first from nature to the constructed that imitates nature, and the second from the constructed that imitates nature to the photographic image that reproduces it.
All this causes a mise en abyme, a significant concatenation, a superimposition between the real, the re-made/re-produced and the image that reproduces and is itself reproducible.

Roberta Valtorta

Part of the text from the catalogue: Et fiat lux, Roberta Valtorta; Pazzini Editore, Rimini, Italia (2018)


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The project Et fiat lux highlights two fundamental questions concerning not only the essence of photography that is besides installation but more generally the nature and the making of art: reproduction and fiction.

The entire Et fiat Lux project is constructed with different media and all of them share the investigation of a certain number of elements, approaching them through different methodologies and approaches. Between these elements, ambiguity, fictions, light and reproduction, are of pivotal importance.

The first part of the project Et fiat Lux consists of 9 photographs inspired by baroque still life paintings. The flowers on the photographs are simulacra, a perfect imitation, the copy of real flowers, made of plastic, nylon and polyester. In their beauty lies the historical and artistic significance (as dead nature) and in the process itself (folding flowers into sculptures, for the photographic reproduction). These images are pure colour compositions that evoke classical aesthetics and become an artefact of ecological pollution. They are dead even before being alive.

The second part of the project Unveiling the Veiled: Tesla, is a photographic installation and represents the process of the ikebana making in the artist studio. The image is printed on a cheap perforated canvas and exhibited on an advertising stand. The sculpture produces electricity by the generator that powers neon lamps outside the sculpture and continues into the gallery space, illuminating it with a pulsating light. The alternating electric waves, produced by the generator, cause the constant blinking of the neon lamps. The vision of the installation seems to suggest the latitude of transfiguration, which presents the same ambiguity as an alchemical transformation, hovering between illusion and scientific precision. The work enacts through the fiction itself, revealing deception and restoring us for a moment, awakened.

In the series After Et fiat lux, the ikebana is composed just with the vegetal bushes (without flowers), while the presence of flowers is rather evoked by the light. The light irradiation occurs in the darkroom in the phase of production: after the film exposure and before the process of development. The film (4x5 inch) is inserted into a non-transparent and at spots perforated wrapper and exposes it in the darkroom with lights of different colour that create glowing light prints on some parts of the images. Each of the glow is controlled by the shielding, well thought and not left by chance, to allow a selective passage of the light. Each image is therefore unique and at the same time unrepeatable because the effect of light is unpredictable. In these series, the photographic practice is pertinent as the purely physical/chemical act, where the photo sensible film resists on photons as an impregnating tool.