J* conversations

DIALOGUE with Erik Kessels

E.K. In JEST you create and use different layers to tell one story.

There is the one of your photographs and your family archive (that maybe isn’t actually your family), and there is the layer of the aesthetics: most of the images and objects and pages you composed are very aesthetic.

I feel this element is used to strengthen a surprise effect and bring the audience to look at the image differently.

You even create sculptures with the images and it’s also through this material element that you tell your story. That’s something that works well, is surprising and keeps the attention of the viewer.

DIALOGUE with Ambra Senatore

A.S. I’m curious: the photograph of the iceberg is very strange. Is it real?

I.T. It is the last image that I included in the book and it is also the last one that I found in the archive. It is a real photograph that was taken in Canada, and everything that you see is how it appeared when the photo was taken; and with this I mean that I didn’t do anything to modify it. It was part of a sequence of images of the sea, where the horizon was filled with icebergs.

Everything is absurd and unreal in this picture: the way in which it is framed, the isolated house with the tree by its side, the gently sloping sea, and of course the iceberg. This picture is the perfect example of how reality almost always exceeds the imagination.

DIALOGUE with Maurizio Maggiani

M.M. Jest is the perfect example of the creativeness of the memory.

We need to put our hands deep into our memory, to truly do it justice, to not let it become dead stone, tombstone, artifact.

Put our hands into it and turn it into something that is yet to come!

DIALOGUE with Erik Kessels

I.T. When you close your eyes what is the first image of JEST that comes to your mind?

E.K. It would be one of the first images of the book, the dark image with the Hippies eyes. Because when you close your eyes you almost always see this darkness with white bright spots, and this image made me think of that.

I also like that it’s placed at the opening and the ending of the books so it suggests that the whole experience of JEST is like closing and opening your eyes again.

DIALOGUE with Ambra Senatore

A.S. in JEST there is a significant predominance of female figures and one can see without a doubt that the author is a woman, because it has a woman’s sense of humour and lightness.

I would say that it is a work that opens itself to the universal in a feminine way without being a women’s project per se.

DIALOGUE with Erik Kessels

E.K. in JEST you are clearly the editor, you almost recreate things and organize them into a kind of journey with all kinds of signs and voids. You even add a layer of meaning by making objects of the photographs and manipulating them.

It’s like as if you left certain blanks, or mysteries, so when people go through JEST they fill them in with their ideas and their personal associations. They create their own stories and are captured by the surprise they get by the turning of each page.

DIALOGUE with Ambra Senatore

A.S. In JEST as in a performance, the themes and structure unfold and evolve in such a way that you are drawn in to follow its rhythm, even though the narrative is not linear.

I was also most intrigued by its capacity to stimulate continuous questioning and investigation. You find yourself wondering: “Wait, why is this here, didn’t I see it there?”. Once I understood the mechanism of the book, I moved freely throughout the story, stopping for the single images, but most of all looking to see what followed. It’s as if I spent the entire time playing “find the intruder”, at every page trying to figure out what is true and what is not.