Giulia Astesani was awarded a runner up Photoworks prize at the 2015 London College of Communication Photography Degree Show for her project This is the Place.
My practice focuses on the intrinsic ambiguity and unreliability of the photographic medium. Using both digital and analog processes, as well as integrating found objects, moving images and photography, I explore memory’s often fictitious and constructed nature through a process of translation and deconstruction. I’m interested in the tension between the indexical nature of images and their flat inaccessible surfaces, and in how I can translate personal memory and experience into a universal object.
Finding my family’s photographic albums prompted this body of work. I felt familiar and yet alienated from the images in front of me; there was something quite unsettling and frustrating in the experience of looking into a past I couldn’t fully recognize.
In This is the place I use different means to deconstruct this personal collection of images. Process,surface, and materiality become central in the play between preserving and vanishing.
