Fotoscopia

Fotoscopia, photo essay by Alessandra Calò

[F]otoscopia narrates the conquest of a better rate of life and the capacity to examine the most unfigurable microscopic space.
The work, consisting of small piles of translucent plates, includes suggestive representations where the photographic print rediscovers its chemical nature.
In this work the place manifests itself in all its aspects, from an architectural creation to an organised structure, from a research centre to a scene of changing eras. As in her other work, Alessandra Calò rewrites the original materials to give them a new and interim universal meaning. In the care of her vision, every era suspends its temporal dimension and goes on to represent the human condition in its constant fragility.
Mainly captured with the use of iphoneography, but printed using ancient methods, the photoscopic images of Alessandra Calò do not accept representing reality within the limits of digital distance. Rather, they go back in time until they recover the comfort of touch, the reliability of a skilled technique, like that of a doctor who understands touch, a surgeon who manipulates his scalpel with a technology that is full of compassion. To this degree of humanity, mass reproduction becomes impossible and each plate acquires an identity from drools, from the inevitable distortions indicating our humanity: representation takes the risk of being unique, marked by a personal fate. Neither doctor nor photographer can boast total cybernetic control; but the more fate targets the individual, more the city embraces them in its care. In the images of “Fotoscopia”, the material superimposition of levels smashes through the space and gives the work a slight scenographic three-dimensionality in which each can set their own inevitable memories. Everything is visible within the glass plates: here a history that belongs to all is preserved, from the sick to the hypochondriac, to the occasional visitor and every doctor or nurse who – like everyone – grows and ages.
Diagnostic transparency exposes secrets that invite a medical examination: outside a hospital without walls, designed to amalgamate it with the city in a process of osmosis, doctor and patient stop their own other-ness, they rise up from duty of being a body in order to accept responsibility for the humanity in the clinic. Neither doctor nor patient know the code of this examination that has never been seen before. Within the plates we will learn to read the signs of representation, each recognising how much the hospital looks like us. (Alessandra Calò)