Still life Photography / Objects / Household Shrines / Home / Identity / Individual narratives / Memory / Archive / Private Archive

Diana Castaldi has a background in costume design. Her carrier spans across different genres – fringe and immersive theatre, ballet, contemporary performances and screen productions.

Her visual art practice is influenced by the materiality and techniques inherent in costume making production and by an interest in photography and different printing techniques.

She uses different media to explore themes related to identity, personal and collective memory and the relationship between the individual and the structures in our society.

Diana holds a BA from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and has just completed the Master of Research at the RCA.

Our choice of possessions represents our effort to create and shape ourselves beyond the limits of natural form or endowment; as such, our possessions offer a window into parts of our mind that we tend to overlook.
Andrew Dillon (2019)

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory - of this there is no doubt.
Orhan Pamuk (2009)

I take it that any conscious configuration of objects tells a story.
Susan Hiller (1994)

0 - Told by Objects

• Photographic body of practice
  

INTRODUCTION

• Told by Objects: roadmap

1 - ON PHOTOGRAPHING THE ORDINARY

• Photography and social interaction as method
• Aesthetic of the accident

2 - BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: COSMOS AND THE ARCHIVE

• Cosmology and diversity in Hackney
• The home – museum and the exotic object
• Class aesthetics

3 - WHEN THE SELF SPILLS INTO SPACE

• Psychic space as physical space
• Exteriorizing internal objects – imagining a reverse Objects Relations Theory
• Assembling identity through materiality
  

CONCLUSION

• Objects, memory and final thoughts

Excerpt from thesis

I showed J a photograph I have taken of the objects and ephemera on his coffee table, he replies “Mmm, I see…you have taken a photograph of nothing!”. I was kind of tormented by that answer for a while. Was I taking photographs of nothing? Was I trying to make something out of nothing?

On the contrary the photos taken in his cramped, dusty room seem to always make a significant impression on the viewer. It must be because the middle-class bourgeois eye likes to admire polished things when in their own space but is rather intrigued by rougher settings when they are images on the pages of photobooks or hanging on galleries’ walls.

Although J only sees things that need to be tidied away, traces like a handwritten napkin quoting Tarantino, a bag of spray cans, an array of smoking material, a DIY coffee table, and a toy figurine still boxed, may tease the viewer’s imagination.

Miller puts it well in saying that objects ‘work by being invisible and unremarked upon…(they have) an unexpected capacity to fade out of focus and remain peripheral to our vision, and yet determinant of our behaviour and identity (…).’[1] I find reassurance in this notion that objects say a great deal about us precisely because we are not aware of them: precisely because looking at a photograph of our objects we might think it’s an image of nothing. Perhaps this research is an exercise of awareness and an effort to read such signs.

[1] Miller, D. Stuff, Cambridge, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2010, p.51

Edited excerpt from thesis

Objects exist across time, temporality acquires a different meaning in relation to them. They are a depository of memory; they speak from the past and can be messengers into the future. As Orhan Pamuk in The Museum of Innocence beautifully says: ‘The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory - of this there is no doubt’[1]

There is a paragraph in Stepanova’s book In Memory of Memory in which she highlights the difference between history and memory, and this has invited me to reflect on the type of memory contained in objects. It is not a memory that yearns for objectivity and preciseness, it is memory permeated with emotional involvement and what Pamuk calls the vicissitudes of our imagination. This is memory scattered with personal projections and interpretations.[2]

(...)

I think about the translation of the expression Still life in Italian: Natura Morta - literally ‘dead nature’. Constantly moving across languages as I write, I am brought to reflect again on the nature of objects existing between life and death: they are life that doesn’t move in English and entities from which life has evaporated in Italian. In which language lies the incongruity of this expression?

While the Italian definition may the more prosaic, although it implies that there was once life in these now inanimate entities, I think I am more comfortable with the English in relation to the photographs of this project. These images are indeed moments of stillness in hectic lives, constantly in motion. The objects in them, returning our gaze, are silent, yet alive and eloquent witnesses of ordinary everyday life and important pasts, small anchors for the things we wish time won’t wash away.

[1] Pamuk, O. The Museum of Innocence, Vintage, New York, 2009
[2] Stepanova, M. In memory of Memory, Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2017, p. 103