Irregular Configuration

Overview

“In an Irregular Configuration. Rapid changes: complex, turbulent, unpredictable. It’s like moving into uncharted water; this is how I feel. Transformation brings melancholy. Conservation requires changes. Action calls for reaction. Reflux into flow. Trial generates error. Change brings uncertainty. Can anything be changed without being confronted? Or at least taken in to consideration?I see it as a convincing signal that the danger has passed. A shift far from being peripheral brings with it a deep vulnerability. Whenever I am looking for a reference point, all is confirmed and then questioned again. Loss of pre-existing habitat during progressive shifts of conditions. Adaptation, migration, migration, adaptation. A different environment can profoundly change your personality. Many things make sense only in a given surrounding and can barely exist in other circumstances. Eventually in a different context you wonder how those things could have been possible. How difficult it is to adapt sometimes. Change and uncertainty are conditions occurring again and again. Maintaining an equilibrium is not easy, but why should I be pessimistic? I don’t know enough. Tendency to preserve. Ability to improve. Developing a sustainable condition doesn’t generate short- term gains. It requires a continuous redefinition.”

Such are the words of the artist’s voice-over on Irregular Configuration (2005), the video presented at the Sharjah Biennial 8. As in most of her videos, Deborah Ligorio uses her voice to take the viewer through images, forms and mental spaces. Here, images of landscapes are juxtaposed to Land Cover Animations, based on data from the European Commission programme to coordinate information on the Environment (CORINE), showing a survey of Europe’s urban areas. After this in formation, more follows, in a nostalgic aesthetic that could be that of an old medicine book, with a list of information, abstracts from European Environment Agency reports on the impact of Europe’s changing climate.

The artist often delimits a geographical or conceptual area over which she transposes other meanings, as in, for example, the videos Wired Under Water (1999) and Donut to Spiral (2004). Besides, a mental plot can be the original reason for shaping forms and figures, as in her drawings or collages and in several of her videos and animations, Pattern (2001), SizeScape (2003), Landscape (2002).

Deborah Ligorio’s practice is characterised by a personal way of depicting surroundings through a rhythmic succession of narratives. Her work places the different layers of a subject side-by-side, playing with hierarchies and dimensions, making collective and personal stories overlap, which, in this context, often function as a metaphor for one other. A curious and specific mental chain emerges from her representations of a place. Ligorio thereby blends mental, social, cultural, and physical or geographical aspects while observing the environment in all its complexity.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.