Winner of the Luigi Ghirri Prize 2024 and of the FE+SK Book Award, All things laid dormant is presented in Ireland by artist Benedetta Casagrande. Join us 6-7pm on Saturday 19th October at The Library Project to celebrate its launch and meet the artist.
When: from 6pm to 7pm on Saturday 19th October
Where: at The Library Project
The cabinet looks empty — I take a step towards it, my breath fogging the glass. Keeping my gaze fixed, something amidst the vegetation faintly moves. Crawling, the stick insects manifest their presence like an apparition, they manifest themselves as some pictures do, emerging from certain dark recesses where they receded to nest. The animal that I am longs for proximity, snouts touching, but something — the camera? — keeps getting in the way. I try and try but my earth-sharing companions remain beyond my reach, they linger like ghosts on my film roll, trembling ever so slightly in the red light of the darkroom. I bring my snout close to the photographic paper and sniffle to pick up a scent to guide me back, but I am pricked by a sense of anticipated grief — are we able to preserve life only in its most mortifying form, petrified in museum cabinets and in photographs alike? And yet I return and show up for this encounter over and over again, love and longing making a fool of me, as I stay awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.
All things laid dormant questions the ways in which we relate to other animals, the space they occupy in our personal and collective imagination, intraspecific coexistence, and the possibility of constructing new forms of kinship and intimacy in a context of mass extinction. Articulated through a series of encounters with the non-human world mediated by the implicit ambiguity of photography, that simultaneously facilitates and hinders contact, All things laid dormant is both an ode and a lament, an act of love and an expression of mourning that embodies the suffering of loss and the desire to find a place and a sense of belonging within the fragile context of our time.
The book is designed by Milo Montelli and Benedetta Casagrande and published by Skinnerboox in 2024, featuring a text by lee rae walsh
Copies of the book will be available to buy and sign on the night and can be purchased online at The Library Project.
About the Artist
Benedetta Casagrande is a photographer, writer and curator. Her artistic, curatorial and writing practice unfolds through slow research (term coined by Carolyn F. Strauss); slowness as a principle of observation, of attunement, of deceleration and constant repositioning, in an attempt to situate the human experience of the world within wider webs of relations, times and spaces. As a medium which is fundamentally based on encountering the world, she works with photography as a means of entering into a relationship with the surrounding environment and its animal, vegetal and objectual elements, through movements of proximity and distance, presence and absence, contact and loss of contact.
Her work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions, including PhMuseum Festival (Bologna, 2024), Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2024), Photo Brussels Festival (2024), ADI Design Museum (Milano, 2023), 副本 INSTANCE (Shanghai, 2021) and Photo Ireland Festival (2019). She is the winner of Premio Luigi Ghirri 2024 and of FE+SK Book Award, thanks to which she published All things laid dormant (Skinnerboox, 2024). Benedetta is one of five founders of Ardesia Projects, a no-profit organisation dedicated to visual culture, and runs the accessible education program Show&Tell alongside Elena Vaninetti. Since 2021 she is Head Archivist and Project Manager for the Daniele Tamagni Foundation. In her free time, she works as a volunteer in a wildlife rehabilitation centre.
