Tell us about your background: training, projects, your own way to approach photography...

Rachele Maistrello (RM): I got BFA at IUAV in Venice and I spent time in Annette Messager’s studio in Paris before moving to Zurich where I specialized myself on Photography at ZHDK. This is my official education, my real training started in the little town in the North-Eastern Italy where I was born and raised. I grew up thinking that this place was the center of the world, even if this center wasn’t compliant with the reality I was picturing in my mind. For this reason - as a teenager - I started investigating the surroundings looking for hidden traces, invisible realities much closer to who I was. It’s been these archeology and sensitivity practices which combined built the basis to enlarge my imagination and the images I would create in the near future. I trust images since they saved me many times, I believe in their power. I’m much more interested in images connected to the reality and I’m completely fascinated by those which could be considered as evidences. Following those feelings I created my own way to use photography – not just for catching instants – to record present actions, the making of mechanisms of overturning the reality I usually create and document.

 
© Rachele Maistrello from the series ‘A Hero’s Life’

How has photography been used as media for public art projects?

RM: Photography has a great power: it is strictly connected to a certain time and space. This makes photography a real media for interaction since the contingency can often free itself from the monumental attitude of public art. There’s not the moment in which a person decides just to pose; there’s the precise instant when this person recognizes himself or herself: in this performing phase we get to the real arrival. In a public art project linked to a recording device there’s usually a hierarchy between the artists and the participants, but if the same people represented in the photos are involved into the creation of its own presentation, there’s a real chance to build a relationship of mutual respect and independence in which the artist is like a guide, much closer to a biographer than a storyteller. This is what I’ve done during the project “a hero’s life”.

 
© Rachele Maistrello from the series 'Beyond Reasonable Evidence' 

'The History Within' is your last project, what is that about?

RM: On April this year, I’ve been invited to propose a project for the square facing the Contemporary Art Museum of Ljubljana. Two strict guidelines to be followed: it had to be a public art work investigating the role of the artist in a determined community, and it had to respect the outdoor given space. The project had to be designed for a neutral space and for standing the weather. I decided to leave my role and my context, to go and search for material inside the houses (and the life) of potential visitors unaware of my work. I tried to create an atlas of the images in each house I’ve been, in order to reverse the existing hierarchy of the Art-attached spaces where it is usual to exhibit a selection of the most important images intended to last and reach posterity. After taking photos inside the houses I printed them on ceramic on special tiles for outdoor spaces able to last for a long time: the images changed their own status, from vernacular ones to record of the present. It’s been very important not having a real selection standard, in this way all images have the same right to exist based on fortuity able to catch apparently meaningless elements in the present, getting emblematic in the future.

 
© Rachele Maistrello from the series 'The History Within’

How was the interaction with people involved in the project work, and how was the reaction to the final result?

RM: I think that if we behave in a sincere way, people can feel it. It’s probably this approach which made possible to me being invited inside people’s houses; after few lucky meetings people starting proposing themselves as active part of the project through internet of word of mouth. The interaction is been facilitated by this “request-reply” modality guiding the communication in between individuals. I’ve been thinking about all those cultural mechanisms (as buying and selling process) based on established codes of social interaction: the presupposition is to avoid embarrassment and get to the point; this allows to divert the usual rules. If you ask for something very specific people won’t face the awkwardness of the unknown, they’ll be much more open to help and understand what you want from them: this made me more comfortable in people’s houses and paradoxically able to create real exchanges. This happened during the final phase as well, while I was giving them something back revealing the results of our work. Many participants to the opening event shared with me that they’ve been very proud of showing something so personal yet being able to keep an anonymous status at the same time. A little secret it’s been created between the participants and their own city and this is been pretty rewarding for most of them.

 
© Rachele Maistrello from the series 'The History Within’

'The History Within' has a blog and a very active Facebook page. What’s the role of Social Media platforms in a public art project like this?

RM: I wanted to make sharable a process usually unrevealed, the making of a work of art. I tried to use Facebook in the best way you can do it nowadays, sharing something that happened for real, nothing replacing the reality in order to share the experience. I got both positive and negative comments, a lot of sharing … this supported me in opening the process to people involved. Many times after getting in a new houses, their inhabitants asked me info about people already involved, about the faces already seen on the blog until asking themselves what I would show of their life; we often decided together. At the same time – on Facebook and Tumblr – I did not share the images of the final series I’d print on tiles, I decided to show the leftover material as evidence of my experience inside strangers’ houses. It’s been my personal way to add value to something was not thought to be part of the final work, my way to make all the process much more popular.

 
© Rachele Maistrello from the series 'The History Within’

Tell us about your future projects, where we can find you on next months?

I have some exhibitions already scheduled for the next months in Italy which will bring me to different areas in the center and the north of the country. You’ll can also find me in Zurich or Berlin where I often spend my time. For sure you’ll find me at least once a month at Alberoni (a beautiful beach of the Venetian island of Lido) taking a walk on the shore searching for traces of the Summer getting ready for Winter.

LINKS
Rachele Maistrello 
Italy