Dafne Salis

My fascination with photography lies within the medium specificities. The tactics that realize an image and holds the politics of power behind it.

‘They went into a very thick forest, where they could not see one another [...] Little Thumb let them cry, knowing very well how to get home again, for he had dropped the little white pebbles all along the way.’ Charles Perrault. The Tales of Mother Goose, 1696.

Darkness is photography's territory, until light comes in, from a pin point, and the image is created. From our world's complexities, little pebbles are left behind. Selected pictures are unwittingly ordered into a narrative that conforms and confirms our mental images.

My research tries to question the validity of the world's narratives as we currently framed it, from a female perspective, within the broad range of identity. I am interested in the relation between the image and the psyche, how visual representations contribute to shape the psychic image we have of ourselves and that we project onto others. How a person individuate oneself? What mental representation/image concur to its definition? How psychical  representation of the self is formed and informed by images  we are immersed in? What are the models, iterations and stereotypes proposed? 

I am particularly interested in exploring visual representation of women. On this matter, my research focuses on the process of creation of the images as a mean of power. The relationship at work amongst the author, the audience and the subject photographed, engraves the gaze upon which the subject is outlined. Is it possible to re-distribute equally the imbalance amongst those three actors? Within this relationships of power, what happens when the subject portrayed is physically invisible although experienced? What is its relation with the visible? And, does its exclusion from the visible realm, affects its hierarchical position? How can we as artists give voice, make visible, something that is not?

At the core of the analysis lies the body with its image. What I perceive of it. Its practices, representations, performative actions, its perceptions, intended as cultural construct rather than a natural given. The body as carrier of meanings and culture, to be reinterpreted, in order, for the individual, to exhume, resurfacing.  

The work, mainly, but not only, photographic, attempts to overturn psychic images of ourselves by means of paradoxes, hiperboles or literal explanations, logic puns, which aim to uncover embedded images meaning. Sometimes, it invokes a fantasy or a narrated world which intertwines psychoanalysis, language and symbols, and questions given models and myths.