STEFANO COSSU: Studio Visit and Interview

posted October 1, 2009 in residents

Stefano Cossu is threewalls’ current Tinkertank artist in residence.  We caught up with Stefano during his open studio hours and discussed what he‘s been working on while in Chicago.  Stefano’s studio is open to visitors on Saturdays from 12-8pm and by appointment, until October 13th.

 
Tell us about yourself.  What were you working on before coming to threewalls?  What are your upcoming plans?

My work is currently based on pinhole photography and storytelling. I have created a fictive firm called SoFiET (Science of Fiction Entertainment Technologies), which is like a movie production company, but not quite - its movies are made out of not more than a dozen frames, but it takes much longer to shoot them than a feature film. And the "technological" part is not what one may think.

Recently I have been working on two shows. One is a group show and prize at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, in October, for which I made a series of pinhole monotypes, printed with pigment, resin and gelatin on paper.

Another show is planned to be next year at the Museum of Photographic History in Krakow, through the Italian Cultural Institute.

And I am loving Chicago. I would like to come back soon (but late enough to let the winter pass).

What have you been working on during your residency?

I am trying to bring my previous work to a further step towards abstraction. I am taking images of Chicago, inspired by the Great Fire and the history of intense destruction/reconstruction of this city.  These pictures are very blurry.  I am trying to leave only a vague shape of what the subjects should be, in the same way that a fire consumes all the fine details of what it burns. It leaves only a shell which still has a hint of identity of the city. Occasionally, they seem to yield some homages to American Minimalism. And I like this a lot.


In your studio, the pinhole cameras that you’ve made are displayed just as prominently as your photographs. Can you describe the role of those cameras in your practice?
  
Before shifting my work towards pinhole photography, I have worked mainly with performance and installation, strictly related to the body and its presence in time. I have found pinhole photography to be an extension of this previous work: it involves the building of a device, a very intense relationship with time and a good deal of weird practices necessary to produce a final image (like going out at night taping suspicious looking boxes to posts and pick them up before the break of dawn), which some people might call performances...


How do you create the narratives behind your photographs? 

That is the ineffable side of my work. They just hit me.


You’ve opened up your studio to the public, holding regular hours.  How has this affected your experience here?

I forced myself to have regular hours... I can never be a gallerist. But I love having cookies and wine with my guests.