I’m not sure it’s there sexual component to catch my attention. Maybe it’s some elements, especially the snails, to arouse in me a sense of familiarity, but also of nostalgia towards something that I can’t quite identify. A reminder of mine childhood there is and it is the snails that evoke it. They were my only ones playmates when I spent the summer in a remote mountain location, in the garden of my grandparents’ house which, after a storm, became the perfect habitat for these little creatures as slimy as they were curious. Then I took them from the shell, placed them on my arms and… I made them crawl on me, amused by the trail of drool they left on my skin. I didn’t know it, but I was assimilating them. In fact, this is exactly what you are talking about Ivana Sfredda in the shots he showed me a few weeks ago in his studio in Milan. Soak up is the title of the series still in work in progress that the Molise photographer carries forward from 2022, or perhaps even earlier. Interpreting the Anglo-Saxon term literally soak up, this refers precisely to feeling of enjoyment that is perceived in the act of assimilating. An unparalleled human and animal need, that of uniting with someone or something, of being connected and of “annihilating the boundaries that delimit a body”.
The macro shots by Ivana Sfredda do not contemplate any hierarchy of subject. A strawberry in a man’s mouth, a group of worms entwined together, a drop about to fall from an old tap, all appear one after the other in a carousel of images that go hand in hand they dance in a perpetual circle, without jerks or arrogance. Hand in handunited, assimilated to each other, in the other. So that in the act of meeting between two bodies, a body no longer exists my and a body your. The power dynamics that man himself has built in relationship between the artefact and the natural they cancel themselves out. Perhaps this is where my childhood memory fits in, where it is clear that in that space-time span I did not know this imposition and no construct had yet had time to settle into the logic such that inequality exists in me today man > animal or even more artifice > nature.
a tension that moves one towards the other
But there is something that goes beyond this unconsciousness or conscience not yet corrupted. Ivana explains it to me by quoting Mario Perniola, philosopher, writer and theorist of contemporary art, delving into the sexuality mentioned at the beginning. Because it is clear that in the union of two bodies there is a tension that moves one towards the other, but which does not necessarily have to be full of a pleasurable purpose. Maybe it’s just an unconscious need to lose its original shape?
«Perniola identifies sexuality as a point of suspension that he defines neutral sexuality: that is, the detachment from one’s body which implies an estranged, cybernetic and, indeed, neutral feeling. This erotic drive is detached from the search for carnal enjoyment as a function of intense contact in which the organic and inorganic body becomes a significant surface. A very powerful communication system that leaps beyond the categories of human/artificial, human/animal, animal/artificial – relating to being as such – which traces the fluid architectures of an alternative body».
in the encounter with the otherI it’s as if he’s satisfied
As Ivana Sfredda explains to me, in the encounter with the other theI it’s as if he’s satisfied. This makes me think of a book I read some time ago, when I was looking for a new, more aware me. A new world Of Eckhart Tolle – recovered in the “esotericism” section of a bookshop -, in fact he was talking about exactly this. Of how theI it exists only in the reflection in the other, when the cancellation of the ego occurs which does nothing but define the boundaries of a prison within which a false narrative of ourselves lives. So in Ivana Sfredda’s shots, which, as she explains to me, are a sort of exercise and game, all this is translated visually, as if to explain the daily and widespread existence of continuous equal and harmonious connections between apparently distant elements both on a hierarchical and semantic level.
«The series focuses on the meaning of contact and relational energy, an exercise in imagining how these incomplete relationships can represent profound portals of teaching.»
Courtesy & Copyright Ivana Sfredda
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