Vittoria Gerardi is an Italian photographer born in Venice in 1996, who lives and works between France and Italy. Having approached photography at a very young age, she studied at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her first photographic series, entitled Borderline and inspired by the Death Valley desert in the United States, explores the relationship between time and matter, a recurring motif in her art, as well as her attention to photographic technique, particularly through the alteration of the chemical process in the darkroom development phase. We met with her to talk about Latenza, a project that has been ongoing for several years, which in its most recent evolution has seen the involvement of Incalmi.

How would you define your artistic practice?
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A practice determined by thought. Understanding the logical system behind each work is fundamental for me. Visually, it means going beyond what is represented: not pausing to see Our Lady, Saints or Apostles, but tonal theory. De Chirico said: “Don't look for meanings, but look.” This approach to creation allows me to be free.

How was the Latenza project born?
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From the desire to reveal the quality that generates a photograph: fiction. We are still used to thinking of photography as reality, as information. Let's confuse the device (the recording machine) with its effect (the accuracy of the recording). There is no real photograph because there is no real time photography. It's always historic: it's gone. Roland Barthes said that a photograph is a combination of what is and what has been. The problem is that 'what was' is not provable. For this reason, I always consider photography as fiction. Latenza reverses the process of revealing the image: the photographic paper is not fixed, so we end up with an image that is never historic, but that continues to become through light. It is not written by light, but it is the light that writes it.

So what is the relationship with traditional photography?
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In photography, the latent image is the image that precedes each revealed image (each photograph). It can be said that it is not really considered an image, but rather as a phase. A phase of superposition of two opposing states of light: the visible and the invisible. Historically, the intention has never been to preserve this phase, but, on the contrary, to reduce its timing: we went from hours, to minutes, to seconds of latency before being able to see the result of a photographic exposure. For these reasons, I found that at this stage there was the technical and conceptual substrate for composing a photographic image.
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The project, already from the name, owes a lot to the theme of time. How is it central?
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Being is memory, and therefore time. Photography has a particular relationship with memory, and therefore with time. When I think, I can't ignore time, and so time comes back into everything I do.

What does time represent for you, both in an artistic and existential dimension?
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Time is our internal genetic program, the dimension in which we live. We cannot think without a temporal dimension, which is why we have verbs (which we call times): to spatialize the phenomena before, after and during. It is a space-time, as Kant said: “a limited living being has something infinite in it.” Time is this infinite. And then, for that's the art: because it's a system where you can go back, change time. It's the only way to own time.

How has the Latenza project evolved?
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Introducing a device that allows you to adjust the transformation of photographic paper, a wooden box that can be opened through a door fixed laterally. The door consists of an enamel cliché (removable and reversible), while the photograph is mounted inside the box. It's the metaphor for Shrödinger's cat: if you don't open the box, you can't know if the photograph is there or not. You can only say that it is latent, that is, hidden.

Matter is very present in his work. How do matter and image interact?
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I work with darkroom photography, where the image is never dissociated from matter. It is a photochemical process: the silver salt emulsion reacts to light and creates the image. Somehow, in this process, the image is matter. It is therefore a matter of developing what the Greeks called Téchne, a technique, to transform matter/image into a form.