Livia Sperandio

I am investigating the concept of perception. I am interested in the relationship between photography as a medium and objects in reality, with a physical existence and tangibility. How do we sense this connection and how do we perceive images and objects?

The series Out of the cave (2018) is named after Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Plato uses this allegory to talk about the theory of forms, political issues, truth and justice. The Allegory of the Cave was written more than 2000 years before the invention of photography, but the shadows in Plato’s cave could well represent photography: they are projections, interpretations and a copy of reality. Reality is usually known in the form of tangible objects. What is more real?

Selecting a series of everyday objects, I set up scenes and photograph them. I chose objects that are related to everyday actions and gestures. In the exhibition, the still-life images communicate with prints that pretend to be objects: fake objects that I made using the photos. I am studying the process: photo-editing-print- photo-print. It is a loop of actions based on the same instrument, like turning a piece of paper on itself. What does reality mean? Do we refer to truth, tangibility or something that we know? How do our perception and understanding change? How do we perceive images and reality?

Livia Sperandio (Italy, 1991) is an artist, photographer and contributor for ATP Diary online magazine. She graduated in Cultural Heritage in 2013, then attended the Photographic Academy in Milan. From 2014 to 2016 she completed the Master of Fine Arts in Imaging Arts and Photography of the Fondazione Fotografia Modena. She worked as a gallery assistant at the Franco Noero Gallery, in Turin, and she improved her research during an artistic residency at the Royal College of Art, in London. In October 2017, she participated in Generation What?, a group show at MAXXI, Rome. During 2017 she taught Editing and Photoshop at the Fondazione Fotografia Modena Master’s. She is interested in photography as a medium of conceptual analysis and in studying the image looking through the different layers of which it is composed.

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