The Modern Spirit is Vivisective (signed)

by Francesca Catastini

Photographs: Francesca Catastini

Text: Federica Chiocchetti

Publisher: AnzenbergerEdition

112 pages

Pictures: 50

Year: 2016

Price: 34 €

Comments: 23 x 16 cm, hardcover with embossed cover picture, Swiss brochure, Edition of 500 copies including 25 collector's editions with a print.

This book won the 1st Prize of the ViennaPhotoBookAward at the ViennaPhotoBookReview of the ViennaPhotoBookFestival in June 2016. It was selected by the following jury: Gerry Badger, Andreas H. Bitesnich, 
Josef Chladek, Roger Eberhard, Nela Eggenberger, Brad Feuerhelm, Peter Gössner, Rob van Hoesel, Espen Krukhaug, Calin Kruse, Harald Latzko, Corinne Noordenbos, 
Andrew Phelps, Klaus Pichler, Hannes Wanderer.

www.viennaphotobookfestival.com

“The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient spirit accepted phenomena with bad grace. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory by the light of day.”

So said the modernist manifesto of a young James Joyce, a former medical student, in his Stephen Hero, offering a portrait of the artist as vivisector, a carnal voyeur whose victim suffers his gaze as she does the surgeon’s scalpel.

Photo-artist Francesca Catastini explores vivisection as an aesthetic performance. Acting as both the victim and the artist, she dissects the very notion of scopophilia, blindness and the human quest for knowledge.

Presented as a cornucopia of materials, her found photographs of old Anatomy lab and blind school students mingle with appropriated frontispieces of Renaissance Anatomy manuals and her austere yet ironical photoworks to form a telescopic structure divided into overlapping sections – the chapters of her forthcoming book: on looking, on touching, on cutting and on discovering.

Federica Chiocchetti, The Photocaptionist

> book review by Gerry Badger for the magazine 1000 Words

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