Artist statement

“The movement of the landscapes which the traveller catches only in partial glimpse prevents him from perceiving it as a place and causes a break between the spectator-traveller and the space he is contemplating or rushing through.” Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995).

Non-place is a term used to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as places. From here to there is a silent video piece made of still images which explores the spectator-traveller relation to landscape. The journey across a space in which the traveller-spectator cannot be fully present translates into images that fail to fully describe the space he/she is contemplating or rushing through.

By affording man-like, slow-shutter vision of the anonymous high-speed landscape shifting outside a train window, photography seems unable to grasp the world around us. In the sequencing of snapshots, the passage from one place to another recomposes in a plurality of unrecognisable places. The visual recount from behind the window glass is unable to reach beyond the surface: Italy, England, Slovakia, all look one and the same. This inability to capture and hold the landscape functions as metaphor and leads to a further reflection about photography in the 21^st century and its fundamental role to portray and document our world. In the flattening and discolouring of the landscape lies a subtle parallelism between landscape and society, and society as a non-place in the eyes of contemporary photography.

Biography

Born in Ancona, Italy. Lives and works between Italy and the UK. Ljudmilla Socci is a visual artist, a photography teacher and the artistic director white.fish.tank, a non-profit organisation dedicated to contemporary art in Ancona. She has participated and collaborated to several art festivals and exhibitions across Europe. Socci studied photography at Westminster University, London.