«This morning again, images of war invaded my daily life. Images of history that insidiously insert themselves into my own. Images that are more and more violent, more and more barbaric, in order to succeed in extracting themselves from the mass and becoming visible. These images supposed to inform us are so numerous, the same ones multiplied to illustrate press articles, that they become transient. Reduced to a catchphrase, they sow in me the doubt
of their origin, of their function, of their truth. As if the war was an immutable and interchangeable state, whose representation would correspond to an archetype anchored in the collective unconscious. The war is real, but I lack its reality because I have not experienced it. I am only the passive witness of these atrocities constantly repeated.»
Starting from the critical observation with regard to disembodied images smoothed out by media broadcasting, Lisa Sartorio seizes photographs of cities ravaged by bombing, which she prints on Awagami kozo paper. She then comes to work manually on the surface of this thick paper with an extremely fibrous texture, and carries out various treatments of the order of gumming, folding
or crumbling. By deteriorating these photographs of places, of which she only keeps the name of the conflict as an identification, she brings the viewer to the epidermis of the image, like a peeled, fragile and reactive surface. By modeling the image with her fingers, she summons new signs. She charges the paper with an experience, when in its flatness, the photograph was no longer sufficient to evoke the story of a tragic moment. Of these fleeting stories, whose traces and stigmata inevitably tend to fade from
our memories because they are not lived, Lisa Sartorio proposes
to restore a materially sensitive and impacted form. The series Here or Elsewhere redoubles the collapse of the representation of contemporary conflicts by media photography. She restores our consideration of the other and of the living, by questioning through the sense of touch, the distance taken with these images.