BLIND VISION - Annalaura di Luggo

[...] Blind Vision arises from the artist’s interest in exploring the universe of people who perceive reality with senses other than sight. To achieve this, she made contact with l’Unione Italiana di Ciechi e ipovedenti (Italian Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired) and the Istituto Paolo Colosimo of Naples. Blind Vision constitutes not only a social and artistic investigation of human perception, but it also seeks to reaffirm the value of these individuals as an active part of society. The project began in November 2016 when the artist met with a group of 20 partially or totally blind people of various ages, professions and educational levels to establish a connection and rapport with each. She then photographed their eyes and invited them to share their experiences of living with one less sense and relying on other means to perceive reality.. [...] These interactions have also built a rich archive of life stories, feelings and reflections on how society perceives the visually impaired. They have been gathered together in the multimedia installation Blind Vision, which introduces viewers to the experience of not seeing. One descends down a ramp to a room, whose architecture is reminiscent of a dark grotto in which 20 light boxes have been placedi. [...] Each of them reproduces the form of the iris of each one of the project protagonists and is outfitted with computerized chips for light and sound, which are activated via a timer. Following a script carefully created by the artist. [....] , each light box lights up for a few moments and narrates in the voice of the given protagonist a fragment of a life story, the experience of confronting a limitation that far from defeating that individual has led the discovery of a rich potential for strength and hope and alternative paths toward living with optimism and making dreams. [...] In today’s world, which promotes competition for space, opportunities and to get ahead, as well as pretense, showiness, judgment, exclusion and separation, Blind Vision proposes instead the concepts of empathy, unity, inclusion, listening, understanding and accepting. As Descartes cautioned in his analysis of human optics, it is the soul that sees, not the eye. [...]

Raisa Clavijo

[...] Blind Vision [...] , is the title of Annalaura di Luggo’s multifaceted project at the Istituto Paolo Colosimo aimed at the blind and partially sighted people of Naples in which she links planes of scientific and social research, photographic record and performative interaction. But, above all, it focuses on modes of expression that are able to return truth to the object and subject of the research. [...] Articulating this dichotomy between body and mind, outward appearance and intimate sphere, di Luggo challenges her method of analysis and the very foundations of her discipline, tackling, in the case of Blind Vision, the gaze of subjects with total or profound visual impairment. Developing a relationship of exchange and mutual interaction, the artist has favored tactile and oral contact in order to enter into a dimension of experience and behavior that explores the concept of “vision” itself, evoking and sharing its alternative forms. The works thus become metaphors of this reality: multimedia installations immersed in a darkness that is redefined by auditory components and tactile texture expressed in three-dimensionality. The process by which the artist further communicates this epistemology of possible visions is entrusted to synaesthetic resources, in which image, word and sound overlap and, in fact, redefine each other. How to see, what to see—questions that in Blind Vision become synonymous with a more absolute inquiry into the multiple realities of the individual and the multi-verse of our human condition [...]

Andrea Viliani