Giacomo Colombo

Alternate Takes (2020)

If the image exists as an ordinary flow of interconnected representations, how can this visual content be reactivated? What is the relationship occurring between the tangible and intangible during the visual experience? How far can the resistance of a photographic object be pushed?

Giacomo Colombo began to re-evaluate the role of photography in the process of generating what can now be defined as a photographic image, increasingly interested in the high availability of tools in the contemporary visual environment that can contribute to the production of an artefact.
Thinking in terms of re-appropriation and working with photography as a source material, he wonders how it is possible to give life to new works by following a hybridisation process between physical and digital elements.
He is interested in extending the photographic medium beyond traditional representation. In other words, he focuses on how images can be accumulated, consumed, and re-examined and how they can change in value through transformative operations.

Musical elaborations, especially in contemporary jazz, are a focal point in the realisation of this series: he likes to think of Alternate Takes as a sonic quest where different layers blend together. Alternate Takes is an expression used in jazz music and refers to the takes of a composition performed during a session or concerts.

The process consists of selecting a variety of materials from his archive among film negatives and digital files. In response to the endless recirculation of images today, he directly acts on photographs: low-quality prints, cropping, enlargements, overlays, post-production manipulations and compulsive digital reproductions serve to disrupt their very representational nature.
This method often leads to significant results or severe limitations. Obsessively recomposing pictures brings to unimaginable ends that allow his to relate to the material in total freedom. As a result, the photographic content or the mode of re-representation suggest new directions. The artefacts do not reveal themselves immediately or deny their own legibility, creating ambiguous worlds seemingly without beginning or end. It is a visual volleying between spatial arrangements and fragmented narratives in an attempt to reorder reality.