Description
In the work Spoglie, Cianotipia – Iran (2023), Eleonora Gugliotta develops an investigation that intertwines memory, territory, and organic matter using the cyanotype technique— an ancient photographic technique with a characteristic ferroprussic blue —to imprint visual and conceptual traces of experience. It is a visual document of the performance Donna Vita Liberà, presented in 2023 during the Biennale Sessions of the Venice Biennale, as part of the Parco Aperto > Ecologia (A)sociale programme, which took place at the Arena Teatro del Parco Bissuola in Mestre (VE).
The geographical subject—Iran—acquires a strong symbolic value: not only as a physical place, but as a “ground” of resistance, identity, and collective memory. The artist, already known for her use of hair, wool, and natural filaments as corporeal and territorial signs, in this cyanotype places the map of Iran at the center as the medium for a visual narrative where matter, time, and history interact. The typical visual elements of cyanotype—the deep blue, the contrasts, the presence of residual white—make the work an object that recalls both photography and painting, transforming the medium into a field of tension between macro-territory and micro-sign. The sense of the “remainder”—of the trace, the spoil, the residue—becomes material: the map is no longer merely a geographical representation, but the surface on which the artist deposits her testimony. The work thus becomes a metaphor for the collective memory of a territory, the metamorphosis of the social body, and the visibility of marginalized or silenced subjects.
