Nicolò Degiorgis, photographer and visual artist
The Long 19th Century Digested Vol. I and II
Focused on Art, photography, publishing, the main objects of his research are social phenomena at large, boarder regions, minority comminities, migrational movements, racial intollerance, islamophobia, nationalism, institutional critique, among others. Long term projects stemming out of personal experiences are a constant in his work. He doesn’t know about Aby Warburg’s work until this call.
The Long 19th Century Digested is a collection of pamphlets reproducing a wide array of books published between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, a period commonly known as The Long 19th Century. Every volume comprises 125 booklets, each consisting of a selection of sixteen pages of the original title. The focus of the project is to shed light on the visual literacy of the era, engaging with its rich variety of topics and reviving the fresh curiosity of the epoch.
> Atlas as a conceptual, formal and mnemonic device.
Nicolò would define an Atlas as visual, interconnected, not necessarily composed of homogenized elements, aimed at assessing the order and helping in orientation of some kind. Most of his work draws back to the idea of researching and mapping the social geography around him through maps, photographs and documents. His approach, inspired by a subject called Heimatkunde (from German: the knowledge of where you feel at home), a subject he had as a child in elementary school, is the one of creating a subjective atlas.
In his works the balance between image and text pends mostly on images.
Thinking about Warburg’s ‘good neighborhood rule’, what are the books that underpin your project?
Marshall Mcluhan, La galassia Gütenberg
Nicolò Degiorgis (1985) is a photographer and visual artist based between Bolzano and Bozen (Italy). He grew up between the boarder regions of Trentino-South Tyrol in Italy and Ticino in Switzerland and studied sinology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at the Capital Normal University of Beijing. He completed internships, scholarships and residencies in various institutions, including at Magnum Photos in Paris (2007-2008), Fabrica in Treviso (2008-2009), Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation in Venice (2009-2010) and the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Trieste (2009-2010). In 2017 he was invited by Museion as guestcurator and in 2018 as a publisher in residence at Rijksakademie van beeldenden Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2014 he foudned Rorhof, a publishing house based in a South-Tyrolean farm in Bolzano. He is part of the curatorial board of foto-forum gallery in Bolzano/Bozen, regularly teaches photography and publishing practices and occasionally curates exhibitions and catalogues.