Giuseppe Cardoni / LICC 2018 Winner Interview

 

 

Inspiration from the past: Giuseppe Cardoni’s creativity sparked when walking around the city, he noticed forms resembling drawings of the Italian futurists. His work, “Traces” shows us tire prints captured in a dynamic way, looking like works of past Italian Futurists. He was chosen New Talent of the Year in Photography.

 

 

 

Interview with Giuseppe Cardoni 

 

You were the new talent of the year at LICC in 2018 with your photographic project called “Traces (tire prints)”. These are a tribute to the artistic movement of Italian futurists. Where did this idea come from?

Walking near a construction site I realized that the traces of forklifts on the rough floor of a shopping center still under construction evoked the charcoal drawings of the Italian Futurists.

Did you photograph random tire prints, or did you make somebody drive around with a car for you? 

Random tire prints, I simply went back to the scene the next day when nobody was there. Immediately I saw the vortexes, signs and prints that I had in my memory and that I was looking for inside me materialize before my eyes and my camera.

The Italian futurists were quite an important group in art history. Did they have a big influence on you? In what way?

“To be a Futurist in the Italy of the early 20th century was to be modern, young, and insurgent. Inspired by the markers of modernity—the industrial city, machines, speed, and flight—Futurism’s adherents exalted the new and the disruptive. They sought to revitalize what they determined to be a static, decaying culture and an impotent nation that looked to the past for its identity.” (cit. Guggenheim Museum) 

In particular I love Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Gerardo Dottori and their research on speed and movement. Indeed, I’m interested in using a sense of mechanical abstraction in relationship to the identifiable elements in the photos and also in making dynamic, visually textured two-dimensional compositions that are graphic designs that rely on lines, planes of space, patterns.

An aesthetic tension created by the lines, shapes and contrast. The compositions become like another surreal imaginary world. (and all this has already been explored by the futurists)

Sometimes I try to challenge viewers to take on new perspectives and new understandings of what they see. 

What kind of projects do you like working on, what is your current endeavor?

I am interested in making photographs with a strong personal connotation, which – correlated with my interiority – represent a reality poised between the passage of time and abstraction. I can apply this approach in many different kinds of photography, right now I am dedicating myself to both a medium-long term reportage and making of photographic books.

What did this award mean to you, how did it help your career?

It was a great satisfaction and, at the same time, a great encouragement. It has strengthened my confidence and determination to crossing borders and also partially dedicate myself to photography in an “art environment”. 

Part of the further successes that I have subsequently achieved are probably due to this “push”, so I can say thanks again for the preference that has been given to me.