# 3
Every image in the Alterlibrary collection is intended as a quote, an excerpt of a larger discourse. But every image also stands as a matter that could undergo a series of operations and alterations. Therefore, images are renewable sources.
Operations: Extraction and Collection. Image alteration: none.
This is an original photographic image extracted from my series called Please do not show my face. It is a collection of photographs divided into six chapters. All images have been shot in Calais and Dunkerque migration camps, across the cities and in the so-called jungles. Please do not show my face is not a documentary series on migration or migrants (but no one can control how images can collect arguments)—this work aims mainly to be an essay on the concept of the gaze. In using documentary photography materials, it interrogates the boundaries of visibility, authorship, and power of representation.
In the chapter devoted to thresholds, each image probes the notion of a threshold as a political act for those possessing the means of representation, compelling us to ask how far we can—or should—go in portraying others. Simultaneously, migration—moving from one place, status, or idea to another—is inextricably linked to thresholds and is never neutral: having, or being denied, the power to cross them determines who can move freely and who remains excluded.
Invitations to contemplate
This image is part of the collection
Keep exploring
- We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for citie …
# 1
Giovanni Ambrosio. Ius Soli. Chapter one: waiting, passing, redemption. Soils: Tessuto non tessuto. 2018-
Every image in the Alterlibrary collection is intended as a quote, an excerpt of a larger discourse. But every image also stands as a matter that could undergo a series of operations and alterations. Therefore, images are renewable sources.
Operations: Extraction and Collection. Image alteration: none.
This is an original image from the long-term documentary archive Ius Soli, which explores the archaeology of the present in the Mount Vesuvius Red Zone. The so-called Red Zone encompasses 25 municipalities and could potentially transform into a vast archaeological site in the event of an eruption. The image is a digital file printed on transparent plexiglass.
Tessuto non tessuto is a black fabric used in archaeology to demarcate and protect archaeological ruins after excavation for preventive purposes. The particular tessuto non tessuto in this photograph punctuates the soils of Mount Vesuvius’s so-called Red Zone, around the towns of the inland cities home to small clothing industries. Dumps of manufacturing remains are illegally left all over the soil to avoid the normal waste treatment process. The stratification of industrial waste treatment issues is depicted in its first layer.
Invitations to contemplate
This image is part of the collection
Keep exploring
- But who really owns land and nature? Humans have no more self-evident rights than grass, trees, and squirrels, not to speak of fungi and bacteria. Property, the conceit that state-backed human social relations give us absolute rights over things, does not go far in the realms of land and nature, wh …
of our Imagination
