In a Conversation With Federico Clavarino on Photography and Discontinuity of Narrative
Exploring the intricacies of the symbolic way in which text and visual elements intertwine and affect one another is one of the main themes Federico Clavarino explores in his work, primarily in the photobooks. The presentation of the story, which can be constructed into a narrative, comes through layers that allow pieces and fragments to interconnect.
With printed work, Federico examines this connection by modifying the balance between textual elements and photography. While in his first book, Italia O Italia, words are avoided, the viewer experiences more textual elements in Hereafter. “I’m not very happy when photography becomes narrative in a straightforward way. I like the idea that I can make the narrative explode or sabotage it by using fragments of texts and photographs,” Federico explains. By reshaping and reconstructing the perception of space and time, Federico brings us closer to creating our narrative and interpretation of his work.
Federico Clavarino is an Italian photographer and artist. During my call with Federico, we dived deep to discuss his approach to working on photobooks, aligning visual elements with text and how it affects storytelling, and his practice teaching photography at BlankPaper School. Federico speaks about his latest workshop on the topic of Traps in Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, which will become the central theme for his practice-based research for Ph.D. studies he’s embarking on at Royal College of Art, London. Ghost Stories is the recent book released by Ediciones Anómalas this year, in which Federico explores several stories which occurred at different points in time in the same space, located in The Frioul archipelago.
Turin
Nastasia: I'd like to start from the beginning. You were born in Turin. Let's speak about the place, the neighbourhood, and what it was like for you to grow up in Turin?
Federico: When I grew up there, at least in my memory, it was a bit of a grey place, a post-industrial city in Northern Italy. There wasn't much to do. Now things have changed. A lot of bars have opened, a lot of places in the city have somehow been made a bit more pleasant. But I remember it as an interesting and rough city in a way. Maybe that is something it has lost. It had a very vibrant nightlife and an impressive underground scene, especially the music scene. I was into techno when I was a teenager, and there was a lot going on in Turin: rave culture and clubbing. I grew up with that, and it was special. But I left when I was around 21.
Nastasia: Yeah, to Madrid.
Federico: Yes. I was raised by bilingual parents, my father’s Italian and my mother’s English. So it felt a bit natural to leave. I had always felt a bit of an outsider because of my mixed background. I guess moving to Spain ended up making it even messier.
‘Lately, I’ve been working with images and text together. I like how words and images miss each other in a way, and then suddenly, there are interesting connections and encounters between them.’
Literature & Music
Nastasia: This was the next topic I wanted to discuss. I read your interview with Urbanautica, in which you talked about how you got your first point and shoot at the age of 13. You speak about how you were not into photography back then. Instead, you loved to listen to music, to read literature. What type of literature did you read, and how do literature and music affect your work today?
Federico: I still read a lot. I probably still read more literature than I look at photographs. Obviously, what I read has changed. When I was growing up, I read classical novels, and later as a teenager I was into science fiction. Then I moved on to more contemporary literature, and today I’m reading a lot of philosophy, but sometimes more narrative works slip in. I think it has always been something that informed the way I approach what I do.
Lately, I’ve been working with images and text together. I like how words and images miss each other in a way, and then suddenly, there are interesting connections and encounters between them. The idea of narrative has always been something I’ve been fascinated by and that at the same time I’ve been fighting against. I’m not very happy when photography becomes narrative in a straightforward way. I like the idea that I can make the narrative explode or sabotage it by using fragments of texts and photographs. You can hint at a narrative while not letting it unfold explicitly to conserve something of the mystery and the incompleteness of the photographic image, of its power. Literature and words have always been there partly as a guide and partly as an enemy.
Music has always been there as well. I played around being a DJ in my late teens. I was into techno and different kinds of electronic music — and what I brought to my photography from it is the idea of sampling, of fragments, of displacing bits and pieces of tracks, extracting them from something and moving them somewhere else. It’s the idea that you can combine things and make them run in parallel and then intuitively jump to something else and do so fluently. When you DJ you are reacting to the moment and the people, so there’s this thought of something that is deeply relational. It also has to do with how your music, photography, literature, or art affect people.
‘Most of the time text is treated as an image in the sense that it’s never complete, it's always bits and pieces, as it was in the case of Hereafter (2014-2019). The book is about an actual bit of history, of family history.’
Building The Narrative
Nastasia: I think what I see in your work is layers. Layers that might be, as you say, intuitive. So, you have to dig deeper to grasp the whole story. I feel that, for example, the photobook Ghost Stories (2017-2021) is connected to time and to understanding time, understanding how we are located in time. And what I find fascinating about how you describe the concept of this book or other photobooks is a literary format. The photobook involves photography, but then it has this layer of narrative in which you speak about the book, which is very descriptive. I wanted to discuss with you how you think your approach to creating a narrative has changed over time. While every book has a different topic still, there's a layer of literary narrative, followed by a visual component.
Federico: I like the fact that you speak about layers because it’s the same way in which I envision it. When I’m working on books, and as you say, on narrative, it's not as in a classic novel, in which time unfolds: you might have jumps, flashbacks, ellipses, and of course you play with time when you write a novel, but mostly it is still a patchwork that suggests the idea of a continuous time. You have a temporal framework that can be very complex, and there’s a story you can reconstruct, usually rather easily. So there is a remarkable difference between narrative and what I do in a book, where things like time and space are exploded into bits and pieces, they are presented as discontinuous and full of gaps. You have to work hard to mend that continuity as a reader, but it’s not always possible. So at a certain point, you resign, I guess. You give yourself over to that kind of brokenness and uncertainty.
I think I have applied this method differently in my books. For example, in my first book Italia O Italia (2010-2014), I avoided words completely; it’s about how the images are woven together through similarities and symbolic resonances between images. So after a while, you feel you have already seen something more than once. There’s a connection between the previous image you’ve seen and the following one, and sometimes it has to do with what they might mean, with some significant detail, with their colour, or with the way a photograph is orientated in space. A finger pointing in one direction in one photograph can lead you to another image in which you experience a feeling of depth. That image could in turn contain a chromatic element that can somehow recall another image you’ve seen. So all those visual elements are not purely visual as there’s a lot of text within the images, it has to do with how people project meaning onto them, and this generates some kind of narrative or drive within the book that leads you forwards and backwards.
This is also an interesting thing about photobooks, it’s rarely read from the beginning to end in the way you watch a movie. You constantly rewind and go forward again in a way you would probably not do with a home video and in a way that is impossible if you're sitting in a movie theater. You probably do it more often with other kinds of things, for instance if you’re in a gallery looking at paintings: you might go over to one painting, then move to another, and then go back to the first one. This also happens a lot with photobooks. That again is a way of playing with time.
In the following books, there is an increasing presence of text. But then most of the time text is treated as an image in the sense that it’s never complete, it's always bits and pieces, as it was in the case of Hereafter (2014-2019). The book is about an actual bit of history, of family history. It’s the story of my grandparents and their involvement with the British Colonial enterprise in the Middle East. In Hereafter there are snippets of conversations that interact with images, but they are never complete texts or complete dialogues. They somehow work like photographs because the feeling is, as with photographs, that they have been extracted from something continuous and cut out. There’s still this idea that you’re working with gaps, with discontinuity, with going back and forth in time, with images that have an element of textuality, and at the same time, with text that can be considered as just another photograph.
‘Although I give a lot of importance to working myself on the structure, editing, layout, and design of books, I always also leave a part of the process open to collaboration.’
Print & Distribution
123aNastasia: I like how you put it into words. Text that provides continuity to the images and, perhaps, even prolongs the moment of pondering on an image while trying to decipher what you see, what you can make of the text, of this additional piece of the puzzle to go deeper into the second when something happened. If we speak about the technical part of the book, what have you learned from working on designs, choosing the printing house, the distribution of the books, the process you've experienced a couple of times?
Federico: I have always worked with other people. Although I give a lot of importance to working myself on the structure, editing, layout, and design of books, I always also leave a part of the process open to collaboration. Usually, when I approach a designer, for instance, I already have an idea of how the book is going to work, but there’s still a lot of details that need to be figured out, and they are different every time. Sometimes designers intervene more. Sometimes it’s just finishing touches and the cover. I feel I have learned a lot from them. The way I approach a book has changed over the years, mostly because I wanted to try different things. I guess books are always a bit different because I always want to try various solutions to problems that sometimes are the same and sometimes are a consequence of different projects. Still, there’s always been this part of the work that has involved collaboration with others. Some designers are more problem solvers, while other designers are more like artists, and I had to learn to work with both.
I have also always worked with different publishers. Other people might have been more consistent, and there are photographers who work with one publisher throughout all of their career. I have always changed publishers, and not because I had problems. Actually, they have all been very positive experiences. It’s more because it just happened that way. Most of the people I published with were people I knew: friends, acquaintances, people I met and felt I wanted to work with at a certain time. I have often had a very intense and personal relationship with them, and it’s always been independent publishers, which means there was also room for freedom and dialogue. Of course you don’t get the same distribution you might get with a big publisher, but it does mean you feel you’re doing something special together, and you can have more freedom to experiment. That changes a lot from basically having a more cold and professional relationship.
BlankPaper School
Nastasia: I love how you speak about collaborations and working together, being open to understanding whether you’re working with a designer who is an artist or a problem solver who might provide a different solution for the book and the layout. I think this might also be connected to your experience teaching at BlankPaper School for several years. It might be connected to this flow of ideas shared by the teacher with the student and back. So, being open to hearing different ideas might be close to working with designers. I wanted to speak about your experience of teaching at the BlankPaper School. What are the topics you’re most fascinated with, or what was your last class about?
Federico: To go back to the idea of collaborations, I don't want to sound like I'm this beautiful person. I'm not so easy to collaborate with. I tend to be a bit stubborn, I tend to want to control things, but as you say, teaching, as collaborating with others, does provide you with a challenge, and it’s a challenge I have often taken up. I think that successful teaching is when you manage to build a creative environment where one can feel safe to speak their minds and propose things. It’s a delicate balance between being able to provide structure and guidance and, at the same time, openness and freedom. I say it’s a delicate balance because if you lean too much towards freedom then you're just useless, you’re not there for what you're being asked to do, which is to provide guidance and structure. On the other hand, if you don’t leave enough room for people to speak, to collaborate, and to affect what's going on and change it, then the experience is a lot poorer.
I have always understood teaching as a very important part of my practice. I think it's art in a way. And it has always been deeply connected to what I'm working on with my photography. Usually, when I'm researching a particular topic or working in a specific way, I'll try to bring that to the class or workshop and propose those ideas and methodologies to others. You get to ask what other people would do with the same thing. It's an interesting way of coming out of deadlocks in your own thinking, things you are struggling with. Suddenly someone else can come up with something extraordinary, and it’ll make you think about the same thing in a way in which you never thought about before. Other times you can also test how obscure the things you're working on are for others, and maybe you've got too deep into something, maybe it’s not comprehensible anymore. So you take a step backward.
On the other hand, you see other people working, which also affects how you work, so it goes both ways. It’s not only you bringing your practice to the classroom, it’s also what they do that has a bearing on what you end up doing. I have found myself positively influenced by students, especially when they are young and inhabiting a different world from mine. There are things that you don't know and you discover them by meeting people and seeing how they think and how they work. So it is also a way of constantly challenging your position and keeping yourself up to date.
As for the last part of the question, lately I'm very interested in traps, so I'm also thinking about photography as some kind of trap. I like how traps are interfaces between different species and different people. I became fascinated with animals and plants that embody or use traps. I also became fascinated with how certain technologies entrap people, with how they create relationships. I have made all this into a workshop, and I proposed it to an academy in the Netherlands a few months ago. We had a few days in which we talked about traps and went through a few examples I have collected, then I invited students to build traps and use photography or video. All kinds of interesting things came out.
I remember a student who thought about trap music and ended up discovering that trap music is called trap because it refers to a particular place. That kind of entrapment had to do with a condition which people found difficult to come out of, so they referred to it as a trap in songs. Trap music became a way of enacting that tension between finding relief from something you cannot escape from by singing about it, and ending up celebrating this something, and thus getting deeper into it. All of this was light-years from anything I was thinking about, but it’s very interesting, and it was because she thought about that and looked at entrapment in a way I wasn’t.
Next Steps
Nastasia: Thank you, Federico, for sharing this example and the story. It’s fascinating, and I would love to attend one of the workshops. I like the idea of art being a breathing organism that can change when you speak with students or when you understand something about what you’ve been doing, so you start to rethink the process and alter your work. This is a very interesting concept. As we’re running out of time, I’ll ask the last question, what are you working on right now?
Federico: I usually work on quite a few things at the same time. One of them is a book. It's a publication of the work I've been making together with my partner Tami Izko. She’s a sculptor, and we’ve been working together on a project called Eel Soup (2016-2020), which we've already exhibited a few times. Among other things, it's about our life together, and it's a mix of photography and ceramic sculptures. Now we’re working on a rather funky book together with a designer friend of ours, Tommaso Tanini.
I’m also working on a commission for a Belgian foundation. It’s about an archive with lots of photography and film work made in the 50s and 70s in Iran. That should finish at the end of this year and hopefully I will get to show some of it next year or in the following years.
I'm also starting my Ph.D. in a month. The research I am working on has to do with the idea of entrapment I was speaking about earlier on. It's practice-based research so I will be making stuff as well as writing. I started working on this a year or so ago; it's about photography, gesture, and traps. It’s still in a very initial form, and I've been playing around with new ideas and new ways of working, at least new for me. Let's see where that goes.
Nastasia: You are indeed working on a lot of thighs at the same time. I wish you a lot of good luck and an interesting experience starting your Ph.D., which I think might be one of the most fascinating things going forward. Federico, thank you so much for this conversation. I enjoyed it a lot!
Federico: Thank you very much, Nastasia.
