Who Is Giacomo?

Giacomo Turra

Student

Giacomo Turra

Academic staff

Gerhard Glüher Stefano Riba Stephan August Schmidt-Wulffen

Course

Studio Exhibit – When Attitudes Become Re-form

Program

BA Major Art

Semester

2020/21 SS

34 photos and 60 adjectives taken from Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger chats

While isolated in quarantine, I texted 34 people on my phone list and asked them to send me a selfie in that moment. Those people are my best friends, my closest relatives, my girlfriend, the nanny who raised me. They are people I work with, who I have shared experiences with and who know me best. Apparently, each selfie is a self-portrait digital photograph representing only the person who took it, but is there more in these pictures? Am I also present among these faces? How much of what defines me comes from the others? If it’s true that the “I” is something produced and that our identity is shaped through social interactions, can I present myself through the people around me?

I then extrapolated from chats on Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger 60 adjectives that these people used to talk about me, sometimes addressing me directly, sometimes in the third person.

Who Is Giacomo? investigates the way we experience identity today, reflecting upon the idea of being present by being absent and inviting people to look for me in the mirror of the other faces.

Dove vanno i cani a morire?

The cloche: Can we revive the traditional greenhouse?

A project made in the course

Studio Exhibit – When Attitudes Become Re-form

‘When Attitudes Become Form’ was a groundbreaking exhibition held in 1969 in Bern and re-staged in Venice in 2013 at Prada Foundation. During the summer semester of AY 2019-2020, students were invited to choose, out of the original show, one artist each and to reconstruct the work. They were also expected to produce a work of their own, which would resonate with their replica experience. Important was to introduce the concept of the artist as participant in an ongoing discourse, throughout appropriation and translation.

Explore this course

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