«The blocks of space-time are figures of light.
The are pictures in themselves. [...]
The eye is in things, just like in the figures of light.
The photograph, if there is a photograph, is already taken [...]
Things are bright in themselves, without anything that illumines them […]
this is really a picture already taken in all things and all spots, but "translucent".»
 G. Deleuze

The idea for the video translucide comes from the concept of "translucent" that Deleuze used to interpret Bergson's philosophy. In Deleuze's work translucent exemplifies how the images are not created by the human vision, but they rather exist in themselves and only need the translucency of the retinal screen to become visible to the e ye. This approach has greatly influenced my way of conceiving photographic art. The video translucide wants to render the idea of an image that dwells on its appearance process, an image that slowly becomes opaque in contact with a translucent surface. I t herefore imagined the process of genesis of a digital photography: when it is taken, the light instantly impresses the sensor, and fixes the image. But, by expanding time, it will look like a shadow that is slowly settling on a single pixel and gradually i ncreasing its resolution . The video therefore is based on a iconographic regression: translucide indeed is a statement against the lust for images in today's society and so it slows down time to show the appearance of a photography pixel after pixel. The photographic image gives up its iconic power to reveals its genesis remaining in an undefined state. There's no obsession of showing or appearing. Translucide asks for time and patience to the viewer, the image appears little by little. Even the sound of t he video follows the principle of revelation. It's therefore generated from the audio recording of the analog video output signal which was then partially reprocessed.

I've been working for a year now on a photo project focused on the  concept  of  the  exhibition  room  as  an  archetypal  clear  and  white  empty space for art, a metaphor of emptiness through which art is  manifested nowadays: all in all a “white  cube” (quoting O'Doherty's  work).   I've been taking indeed pictures of the baseboards of the museums  and  galleries  I’m  visiting,  trying  to  avoid  any  possibility  of recognition of the gallery space portrayed and just focusing on this  humble  and  forgotten  par t  of  its  architecture.  It's  a  work  about  isolationism,  which  is  an  attitude  that  I've  learned  through  my  sound experiments as a musician and sound artist.   This summer, while I  was in Vilnius for some concerts,  I had the  opportunity to spend one hour in Vilnius' Contemporary Art Center  (CAC)  even  though  it  was  closed  for  renovation.  So  I  took  some  pictures of the empty gallery spaces and I also recorded the silence  of the museum while taking the photos (I'm currently working on  field  recordings  trying  to  focus  on  the  concept  and  paradox  of  silence).  In  the  recording  therefore  you  can  hear  the  "silence"  of  the museum and the sound of the camera's shutter.   For the exhibition at Obalne Galerije I cut off the "click" sound of  the  photo - camera  shutter,  leaving  just  an  empty  gap  in  the  recording  of  CAC  rooms.  Therefore  I  focus  on  the  instants  that  come immediately before and after the photograph has been taken,  and on its creation or invention: the gap as space of creation, or  creation as a gap in everyday life. The  aim is the removal of the  photo,  in  the  obliteration  of  the  action  of  taking  picture  and  the  isolation of the moment of concrete creation. Photos catch and fix  the light of an instant; in this work I try to focus on that instant  through another sense, hearing: the listener will feel the void and  fill it by querying himself about the short - circuit generated by the  photo.  

Michele Spanghero