About This Project

Giorgio CoenCagli

The 3 pictures are part of my long-term project “Angelus Novus” “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, the Angel sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. […] The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.” (W. Benjamin, Theses on Philosophy of History, 1942) “Angelus Novus” is a long-term series that aims to present an unpredictable and surprising relation between past an present times, as the deep cultural changes of our age are constantly challenging the common perception of time, history and progress. The work is also conceived, then, as a reflection on how photography can stop time, expanding it and contracting it at once, in a much different way than simply “seizing the moment”. The project is based on Walter Benjamin’s reflections over the idea of progress and history and inspired by Aby Warburg’s idea of the “survival of the past”. Each picture is the result of double-exposure obtained directly on film, a technique often employed by Dada and Surrealist artists and here resumed for its inherent and surprising randomness.

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