Andrea Botto
LANDSCAPE AS PERFORMANCE
curated by Hans-Joachim Gögl

INN SITU – BTV Stadtforum, Innsbruck
4 October 2022 / 21 January 2023

Since 2008, Andrea Botto has dedicated himself continuously to the photography of explosions. As part of the INN SITU series, he was invited to continue this work series in the Tyrol/ Vorarlberg region and this gave rise to new images. Among other places, he visited the Sölden and Silvretta Montafon ski resorts in order to work with the local avalanche experts. He researched ongoing tunnel projects, in particular the Brenner Base Tunnel, and combed the archives for not only historical photographs but also film footage on the subject. Surely one of the most surprising stops on his tour of the region was the Tirol Panorama with its 1,000 m2 cyclorama of the Third Battle of Bergisel in 1809. In addition to his new photographs, the artist will show key works from the many years he has devoted to the subject of explosions.

Presenting this artist’s work in the programme of an art space for contemporary photography is both stimulating and fructifying. Botto’s work offers a kind of culmination point in which many of photography’s key functions and strengths converge. We see landscape photography, but what is being shown here is landscape at the moment of its transformation, dissolution, surrender – the deconstructive antithesis of the visual celebration of romantic sublimity. We experience photographic technology at its essence, in the capturing of an unreproducible moment that would otherwise elude our perception. And, of course, Andrea Botto’s photos are also documentations, the visual recording of the historical events a community of individuals would like to remember for generations. At the same time, however, we are always confronted with a fundamental fascination shared by all, just gazing into a fire or as it were witnessing an explosion: the ambiguously tantalising power of destruction, which can ravage an apartment house with the same technical means as a bomb or connect two countries by blasting a path for an underground railway.

Above all, the photographer sees himself as someone who actively shapes these works. Andrea Botto has a very detailed knowledge of the pyrotechnical processes and responds to them with precise staging strategies and a shooting technique he has developed himself and continues to adapt to his needs and concepts. He knows where to position the camera, getting as close to the action as possible without risking damage to his equipment, and how to release the shutter at the very moment the blasting technician triggers the explosion. A photo shoot of the «landscape shoot». The landscape becomes the photo studio and the subject at once, and the image becomes the artist’s work – beyond the allegedly objective document of an event.

“Pressing the shutter button: this act experienced by the operator
as the release of an energy hitherto compressed,
which was only waiting for the spasmodic moment of its detente”.

Arnaud Claass, Le réel de la photographie, Filigranes Editions, Paris, 2012

The Potential Gaze
Andrea Botto in conversation with Hans-Joachim Gögl

Hans-Joachim Gögl: How did the idea of concentrating on explosion photography come about?

Andrea Botto: My cultural background is so-called ‹landscape photography›, but I have never been interested in the simple contemplative act. I have always been attracted to the entropic processes of modification, of dissolution at different time scales, anthropic and geological. I would like to make them visible and observable at the very moment they are happening. I believe in photography as a staging of reality, as an act of the modification of reality, as a way of interrogating the visual and cultural sphere, of triggering an imaginary already present in the mind of the beholder. For me, the subject is always a pretext to undermine the medium and its language. In almost twenty-five years of career, I have photographed the effects of landslides, earthquakes, historical events and demolitions, and from the latter I came to the use of explosives in the civil field. Unique and unrepeatable events, like large theatrical performances, almost instantaneous transformation processes in which a large amount of energy is dispersed and which, once triggered, cannot be stopped. In which the cause is made visible through the effect. Where the anticipation of the event itself, made up of a whole series of projects, studies and technical preparations, becomes part of the creative process in an almost performative way.

HJG: From a photographic perspective alone, this field opens up a great diversity of discourses for you to focus on. One of the irrefutable qualities of photography is, for instance, the ability to capture something that is barely perceptible with the naked eye: the split second of an explosion. Photography as a technique that can visually capture an instant and in this way render it observable.

AB: Yes, the history of photography is punctuated with episodes that have made something visible that had not been so before (even by creating sensational fakes, as in the case of so-called spirit photography, for example). Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments, Berenice Abbott’s scientific photographs or Harold Edgerton’s technological inventions are just some seminal examples of fruitful relationships between art and science, up to today’s augment- ed reality and artificial intelligence technologies. Or even quantum physics, whereby, according to Heisenberg’s ‹uncertainty principle›, which establishes the limits of measurements in a physical system, the very act of observation modifies the observed objects. Again, to speak with the words of Paul Virilio (in his book Art as Far as the Eye Can See), what he calls ‹tele-objectivity› allowed us to see far away in the universe, but to see more doesn’t necessarily mean to see better. What I mean is that there is always something that goes beyond what we see. As the most recent studies in neuroscience tell us, it is our brain that builds the world in which we live. I am interested in a photograph that shows things not only for what they are, but also for what they could be or could have been. A sort of ‹potential› gaze.

HJG: That being said, you have also often been asked to photograph historic events, for example by a company conducting an extraordinary blast. A classic task of photography is documentation, photography as an instrument of memory, and it is an aspect of this medium that you also teach at the art academy in Genoa.

AB: I always start talks about my work or lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts with two fundamental authors from the history of photography who represent two ways of approaching transformation and photography in general. The first example is that of Charles Marville, called to photograph the districts of Paris that would soon be demolished according to the new urban plan created by Baron Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. A precise testimony of the old city recorded for the collective memory of future generations. Thanks to these images we can now see what the city was like, ‹just before its transformation›. The second case is that of Roger Fenton following the English troops during the Crimean War of 1855. In his images we never see the battle but, instead, what remains ‹just after› it. In his most famous photo «The Valley of the Shadow of Death» you can see only a few cannonballs on a road. Beyond everything, however, we can say that both approaches leverage on the congenital ambiguity of the image: it is a document and testimony of what ‹is›, or rather what ‹has been›, and at the same time it is a metaphor of something that goes beyond the visible and which remains hidden or yet to be revealed. Furthermore, I believe that in a lot of contemporary photography there is still some confusion, intentional or not, between ‹documentary photography› and ‹documentary style›. My training is in a certain continuity with Walker Evans’ lesson: «Documentary? That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. You have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. The term should be ‹documentary style›. An example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore, art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.» With my work I inevitably clash with the traditions of the past, placing myself in a dialectical and in some ways subversive position. On the one hand I literally undermine the foundations of landscape photography (including all the post-New Topo- graphics evolutions) by putting explosive charges inside the image, and on the other I try to oppose all that twentieth-century rhetoric linked to the myth of the «decisive moment».

HJG: The shaping and in this sense «manipulation» of the image starts long before the actual shooting. Whenever you can, you work closely with the blasters on site and have developed your own techniques to be able to position your cameras as close to the explosion as possible.

AB: When I can, I continue to take part in the design of the explosion, in an increasingly in-depth manner, thanks to my constant collaboration with the experts. At the moment I am particularly focused on the possibilities of experimentation provided by underground blasting excavations. An unusual, fascinating and mysterious place, just because it is difficult to access and mostly unknown to the general public.
Inside the BBT (Brenner Base Tunnel) construction site, thanks to the construction company Ghella, I was able to take the first ever photograph of an underground blast. Thanks to the new project created for INN SITU, I continue experimenting in this field, with a unique and unrepeatable new series of images. The construction of the concrete shelter for the camera, the positioning of the flashlights on the walls of the gallery, the meticulous study of the delay times, the connection of the camera to the detonators, the attempt to predict the final result and to approach it by successive approximations; all these operations make up a single performance which is part of the creative process, becoming itself the artwork.