From May 10th to June 8that the library The Platypus the exhibition will be held in Florence “Split Land” with shots taken by Michelle Davis Florentine of American origin.
Musician, DJ, radio speaker, event organizer but above all photographer of rare sensitivity, Davis he animates the nights and the with his creativity cultural life of Florence.
She is passionate about analogue photographic techniques as the stenoscopy also used by Leonardo da Vinci and has recently inaugurated Room38 the first Darkroom in co-workingin via san Zanobi, 38, in Florence.
The exhibition “Split Land” was born drawing inspiration from decadent atmospheres of Southern Gothic novels, among all those written by William Faulkner that he invented “Yoknapatawpha” (divided land), the fictitious Mississippi county where he set many of his novels and short stories.
The photographs of Split Land they evoke a emotional geography, first imagined and then photographedwhere they move dark, sick, libertine female figures, ghosts arising from a distorted vision, break between the new and old world.
Split Land, Michelle Davis
“Split Land It’s a project that has started to take shape in 2021 while I was attending the last year of the three-year course in Photography and New Media at the Studio Marangoni Foundation of Florence. – Michelle Davis told us – My first intention was to concentrate on real life, autobiographical events, but I felt I wasn’t really ready and didn’t have enough time to dissect some themes that I’ve been processing through photography for years, so when I found, or maybe the novel found me “The Sound and the Fury” Of Faulkner. I reflected myself a lot in decadent chorality of the Compson brothers and in the complexity of their relationships. From there my research started. After about a year of incubation and scouting I started taking photographs… the mapping of the places is quite schizophrenic but the key points are found between the ridges of Garfagnana and the plantation houses of Louisianaamong which Rosedown Manor in St. Francisville and the Joseph Jefferson Mansion in New Iberia.”
the female figures of the American Gothic novel in their illness and rebellion tend to reveal a dark, perverse side of a culture shaped by men
Your project originates from American Gothic novels, what fascinates you so much about this particular literature? What book could you recommend?
My family is from the southern United States, my sisters and I are the first “Yankees”, having been born in California. Most of my relatives are in Louisiana and until recently I had not had any direct experience of this America so different from the one I had known. I lived it through the stories my father told mestories with a nocturnal flavor, dense, violent, sometimes tragic. In addition to the aforementioned Faulkner, I found these atmospheres and felt somehow at home in the pages of “The heart is a lonely hunter” Of Carson McCullers, “The sky belongs to the violent” Of Flannery O’Connor And “In cold blood” Of Truman Capote, great classic.
The women protagonists of your shots are almost “ghosts”, who were the people you photographed? Did you know them well?
The big turning point for the project came when I came across a collection of essays on American Gothic imagery entitled “The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic” edited by Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow. Specifically, the chapter “Twisted sisters: the monstrous women of southern gothic” written by the scholar Kellie Donovan-Condron offered me a powerful interpretation: actually the female figures of the American Gothic novel in their illness and rebellion they tend to reveal a dark, perverse side of a culture shaped by men. Without the need to evoke the ghosts or spirits so dear to classical Gothic, the woman’s body itself becomes here an abominable deviation from the norm which in its grotesque nature has the power to destroy entire communities. Just think about Caddythe true protagonist of “The Sound and the Fury”, who in her sexual freedom and her refusal to conform is pointed out as a distorted mother and a scandal-monger but is at the center of a collective obsession.
We are talking about a Victorian-style society strongly centered on the figure of the so-called “angel of the hearth” and I believe that Faulkner in “Absalom! Absalom!” summarized the state of affairs perfectly in the passage in which he has Mr. Compson paternalistically state: “Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?” (“Years ago we southerners made our women into so many ladies. Then the war came and made the ladies into so many ghosts. And so what else can we do, like the gentlemen that we are, if not listen to them, like the ghosts that they are?”) . I know the protagonists depicted in “Split Land” and I am very grateful to them for allowing themselves to be photographedhow grateful I am to Lilith from The Platypus who will host my exhibition in her beautiful library, another woman who refuses to be in the background.
Split Land, Michelle Davis
How did you technically make the photographs?
During the research phase I asked myself how I wanted to best convey the imagery of Split Land and I decided to take up for the first time a medium format camera, a Mamiya C330. I have always loved photography Diane Arbus And she used this machine model to capture the different, the bodies that populate the margins of society e they live between lights and shadows. I liked the idea of use a waist-level viewfinder that does not clutter your gaze and I find that the square format has a more contained and strong nature in terms of composition… not to mention the challenge of having to work with 12 exposures per roll. In short, I wanted to complicate my life… perhaps I wanted to experience the moment of the shot with that same person sense of urgency, fear and trepidation that I felt while reading the novels that inspired the work. Let’s talk about Analogic photography so as far as post-production is concerned there have been no major changes other than some caution in the darkroom.
The whole cycle creates an atmosphere of “magical realism”, do you think it is a characteristic of the places you have visited, or would it be (in theory) possible to photograph it here too, perhaps in some Tuscan countryside
Your question is very apt because in reality the project is based a lot on a constant dissimulation of places. Also from this point of view I found great inspiration in Faulkner who, while maintaining a form of tangible realism, sets his novels in fictitious county of Yoknapatawphawhich translates to in the Chickasaw language “divided land”, from which the title of the exhibition derives “Split Land”. I immediately felt a strong connection with his bestiary of split identities, a concept very dear to me as I myself live on the constant pendulum of biculturalism. I therefore thought that instead of literally interpreting the gothic imagery by setting all my images in the genre’s territory, I could activate a game of projections, based above all on the creation of atmospheres. It doesn’t matter where they were taken. Ultimately, I wanted to evoke a story.
Vernissage on Friday 10 May at 7pm.
L’Ornitorinco bookshop, via di Camaldoli, 10r
Split Land, Michelle Davis
