Devis Bergantin

Slags is a micro-exploration project of the countryside surrounding my house in northern Italy. Due to movement restrictions caused by the global pandemic, I started to investigate what I had previously, strangely enough, always ignored. Starting in November 2020, I began this path of study, which has turned into an almost daily habit: I am obsessed with the aesthetics of the everyday and its narrative potential, so, with perseverance,I have gradually become familiar with the landscape: it is a peripheral environment cut up by industry, where one can witness minute changes every day. My aim is to capture every variation on the theme, which is perhaps impossible to achieve, especially in a monotonous environment such as the plains. Through exploration I discovered that I had to think of this reality as made up of stations, islands of diversity: a cut tree, a broken camellia, the flowers of a magnolia, a new walkway… all in the insistent (and very enjoyable) brown and green of the fields.

The second part of the work focuses on the possibility of giving a second life to the photograph, bringing it into a new and altered narrative dimension, almost fantastic, not commemorative, not entirely abstract. This allows me to expand the work on variation and to research the story that is generated along the alteration process through image manipulation techniques such as photo editing and databending. I am convinced that digital error generates, in the case of photography, a kind of polyphony of meaning that is perhaps even less ambiguous than raw reality. The term Slags alludes to the “wrong” colour residue that databending generates.

(2021)

Devis Bergantin

Biography

I was born on 14 February 1984, I live in Caronno Pertusella (VA), in the north of Italy. I am an outsider and multidisciplinary visual artist (I am particularly interested in drawing, photography, glitch art and writing). I am part of the independent collective Raw Art Foundation in Frankfurt am Main, which is dedicated to supporting the creativity of artists without canonical training. I am one of the two curators of the art and writing-at-the-“margins” project called La briciola squisita, The exquisite crumb.

https://dbergantin.tumblr.com/

https://dbergantin.tumblr.com/

Instagram: @devisbergantin

Facebook: Devis Bergantin (https://www.facebook.com/devis.bergantin/)

https://labriciolasquisita.blogspot.com/

Instagram: @labriciolasquisita