Allegra Martin
The title of the series Double Bind comes from a theory of Gregory Bateson’s from the 1950s: that of the double bind, whereby in a communication between two individuals in a relationship there is an incongruity between the explicit level of discourse and the meta-communicative level. A short circuit therefore occurs. For Allegra Martin, this also happens in photography: the photographer gives the object/subject a meaning that contradicts her discourse.
Welfare Space Emilia is a research project commissioned by Linea di Confine. The survey project, curated by William Guerrieri and Stefano Munarin, examined different types of Welfare. Allegra Martin worked on a centre providing socialisation activities for a group of elderly people. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, a representation of the welfare space as a space of sociality and identity was completely absent. With this photographic investigation project Linea di Confine set out to reflect on the possibility that photography could offer an authorial representation of the social and identity nature of the welfare space.
ALLEGRA MARTIN places the portrait and the transformation of contemporary landscapes at the centre of her work, developing the idea that the identity of a place coincides with the perception that one receives of it. She has re-elaborated the lessons of documentary photography and photojournalism with a personal style, experimenting with new modes of representation in a process of deconstructing the real. She uses medium format cameras and film, always carrying with her a small compact automatic camera and expired rolls of film or disposable cameras, in order to obtain photos where there is space for error. Among her photo series are Double bind (2005), A Sud di Nessun Nord (2014), Cartoline dalla Brianza (2013). Since 2013 she has been an editor at “Exposed”. *She was born in 1980 in Vittorio Veneto, she lives and works in Milan.