Interview: Stefano Anghileri
Luca Curci talks with Stefano Anghileri during the 10th Edition of CONTEMPORARY VENICE 2022, at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello.

Stefano Anghileri was born in Lecco (Italy) in 1985. Stefano lives in a tiny ancient village between the mountains and lake Como. He is a landscape enthusiast and an environmental engineer expert in digital cartography. He started taking photography seriously when he bought a digital camera, in 2004. This interest came first as a way to share his passion for weather and geography. He soon started to travel (US, Iceland, Norway, Namibia, Madeira, ….) following his passions. His interests lasted over the years. Meanwhile, he refined his photo style and broadened his collection. Stefano is mainly focused on landscape photography and natural geometries. With his art, he would like to represent the inner world of feelings through the outside world. Because of this, people are rarely subjects of his scenes. He also tries to take photos that cannot be easily related to a determined time and space. His photography belongs to the digital generation. He prefers yet to photograph with traditional techniques, avoiding heavy post-production. He considers manipulation far from the purity of nature and closer to digital art. Currently, he enjoys experimenting with minimalism and conceptualism.

Luca Curci – When you take photos, are you usually inspired by the situation or do you find inspiration in yourself?
Stefano Anghileri – I would say both. I think photography is a visual language, so you should say something about what you are seeing, but you select what you want to report and decide how. Without inspiration, you basically only produce a description. So it’s important that inspiration guides you both in experiencing the situation and expressing it through a camera.

LC – How important is the editing process in your work? How is yours?
SA – I have precise limits on what I want to edit and what I don’t when I do photography. My goal is to edit in order to overcome the technical limits of the camera and recreate the scene that my eyes have seen. I really enjoy science, so my images have to be sort of “real”. I perfectly know a camera could never exactly reproduce what I think I have seen, but I want to come the closest I can to it. My art contemplates corrections of contrasts, saturation, hue and camera errors like vignetting, flares, and dust on the lens. I have less interest in overcoming reality or daydreaming. When I want to cross these limits I think I’m doing something which can be called “digital art” or “illustrations”. Don’t get me wrong: you can do marvels of digital art and illustrations – I’ve been several times in awe of fantastic edited images – and sometimes I wish I was as creative as those artists. However, when you say “photography”, to me it has to be “real”.

LC – Where do you find your inspiration?
SA – I have a big passion for the subjects I photograph. I learn everything I can about them, I imagine how I could photograph them in a meaningful way till I can say I “connected” to them and then I go. Even if I’m used to planning where and when I would like to take my photos, I let the situation and the moment surprise me, so that I almost always come back home with photos that are significantly different from the ones I had imagined before shooting. Without “connection” it’s like being photographically blind.

LC – How do you feel when you see your work completed?
SA – Completed? Nothing of my work is completed and probably will never be. I’m an avid collector of images and moments. Every time is different, every time a detail or a main feature changes, every time I am different, my mood changes, and my propensity to create changes. As time passes, I look at the same images in a different way and I have always ideas to deepen the theme. I’m not going from A to B, I’m just hanging around, exploring everything I can, watching as it goes on and learning about it.

LC – How is being an artist nowadays?
SA – I think in this phase of history everyone is an artist. Probably the term “artist” itself smells old because it sets a limit between who is an artist and who is not. Art is part of each one of us and, as long as you do something, you do it in your personal way, so with your personal art. Moreover, everybody now has the instruments to produce his own art and they are extremely easy to reach as it has never happened before. I’m not saying that you can just do anything you can imagine, but the common, basic, traditional art instruments have become accessible to anyone. This is a start and it’s for everyone. This is particularly easy to understand with photography. Photography now is everywhere. Nearly every social media post, every newspaper article, and even every label have a photo attached. Each one of these photos can be considered art. There are several people who became rich by posting photos of their everyday life on Instagram. So I would say that being an artist nowadays is just like being an average human being who does a number of things in his own way, with his own art. We are all artists.

LC – Do you agree with our vision of art and what do you think about the theme of the exhibition?
SA – ITSLIQUID’s vision of art, in my opinion, is the direct consequence of the “everyone is now an artist” speech I did in the previous answer, so I would say I agree with that. Probably the next step would be to stop talking about “art” and “artist” and start talking about people and what they do in their life. Each one of us is a work of art in what he does and in how he does it. The theme of the exhibition was the relationship between body and space and the hybridization between identities and cultural/physical/social/urban settings in contemporary times. I think the body is the boundary of something that can be perceived, while space is what it is not the body. But then, human beings at least, have a soul and a soul can fit a lot of space! Space can enter and mix with us and be part of our experiences.

LC – In which way the artwork presented in our exhibition is connected with the exhibition’s theme?
SA – My photos are an example of how something which stays outside of us can reach our inner self, changing shape and causing emotions. The subject is water and the different shapes it can take. We are mainly composed of water, so we can say water is both inside and outside our bodies. And it’s also in the space, it’s in the air we breathe. So water fills the space, it is different from it, but it has no body. For example, in “Highway” I photographed a frozen puddle. Imagination takes you for a ride and the picture turns into an abstract where some shapes can be guessed. The puddle was frozen, but the image, thanks to the long parallel lines, is very dynamic. It’s like looking at a road from above while it crosses mountains and houses. “Trickles” are frozen patterns of water taken from above on a beach. Water digs and then highlights the shapes of sand, its body and the space. “Lace” is a mixture of ice, snow and water that are on balance in that specific moment. “Ripples” explores the effects of the bodies of rain droplets on the surface of the lake. Water on water, but the bodies of droplets leave a trace, they fill the space.

LC – Did you enjoy cooperating with us?
SA – I appreciated being able to show my works in Venice, I liked the exhibition, how works of art stayed together and meeting some like-minded people.

LC – What do you think about ITSLIQUID Platform?
SA – It’s a good resource and a good display for many artists. It perfectly shows the works and connects people.

LC – What do you think about the organization of our event?
SA – The exhibition was OK. The set-up of the exhibition worked fine: I didn’t meet any problems.