Gallery Luisotti extends its warmest congratulations to Marina Gadonneix and Hélène Giannecchini for their awards from the Lewis Baltz Research Fund.
The Lewis Baltz Research Fund was established in 2015 to honor the vision and memory of Lewis Baltz, and involves an annual grant of a substantial fund to support the creation, completion and dissemination of a project in any medium.
This is the first year in which the award went towards a Gallery Luisotti proposal.
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Marina Gadonneix – Factories of the Social Fabric
Factories of the Social Fabric investigates the infrastructure of computer systems and the social implications of artificial intelligence. The aim is to question the creation of a new social fabric through technology and our ability to comprehend it.
The main objective of current algorithmic models is to analyze human behavior and thus to make it more predictable. The widespread use and relative invisibility of algorithms in governance and commerce has intense psychic implications. This project takes up the concerns in regard to social coherence by approaching this fear rationally in order to anticipate the collateral damage of these technologies.
Employing the principle of anticipation as a compass for her project, Marina Gadonneix will explore the aspects of uncertainty/prediction, invisibility/visibility, and fear/knowledge in human and machinic interaction. This project is a work of investigation and creation based on theoretical inquiry, artistic production, and collaboration with scientists and philosophers.
The project attempts to deconstruct the power of algorithms used by man and for man, bringing us to questions of how elusive technologies are employed for appropriation and control.
Hélène Giannecchini – The Unseen
This project circles around an encounter between of Donna Gottschalk, an American photographer, and Hélène Giannecchini, a French writer and art historian. It questions the relationship between literature and photography, the possibility of political empowerment encapsulated in archives. Donna has extensively used photography as testaments to people at society’s margins: the queer, the poor and those who have run away.
Donna’s work, which remained private for many years, is essentially composed of portraits. Her work has uniquely focused on intimate relations over a long time span, such as her best friend Marlene, a proud butch lesbian, her roommate Chris, her siblings: her brother Vincent, her sister Mary, a lesbian burlesque dancer and her trans sister Myla whom she photographed from her early teenage years to her passing away. Thus, she has unveiled the beauty and power of the bodies of these individuals, but also, in the background, what homophobic and patriarchal society is actually doing to these bodies.
Hundreds of images have not been printed yet from her extensive collection of negatives, and extensive editing work needs to be done to reconstitute the series. This project will include the creation of an oral archive in order to better understand the lives she photographed, as well as their biographical details. The Lewis Baltz Research Fund will help Hélène Giannecchini to do curatorial research on the images and place them in the context of social and art history.
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Images: 1. Marina Gadonneix, Untitled (Avalanche #1), 2016; 2. Hélène Giannecchini, Selfportrait in Maine, 1975, tirage argentique sur papier. Courtesy Galerie Marcelle Alix