IMAGES

Image-Worker
BY. Tarek Elhaik


During his visit to AIL, the Anthropology of the Image Lab I direct at the University of California in Davis, Luca Galofaro generously shared with us past and current work, architectural, photographic, and curatorial. The encounter with his photographic image-work, in particular, provided us with an inspiring tool-kit that connected the image environments of contemporary architecture with the conceptual problems of both modernist and contemporary anthropology. While the term ‘contemporary’ means many things to different people, the same can be said of the word ‘modernist.’ Although not a Modernist, Galofaro nonetheless continues to have one foot in the photomontage tradition of László Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe, a mode of image-work put to the service of designing a New Man illuminated by an intelligence to come. With the other foot in the post-1960s photographic, cinematic, and anthropological inquiries of Superstudio, he too deploys images that draw from, accelerate, and exhaust the “architecture of Reason” imagined by the “primitives of modern architecture” (Bauhaus, the 1920s) who paved the way for a natura naturata and man-made environments built on a Monumento Continuo.

Yet, Galofaro’s collages and pictorial compositions transform these image-making traditions and pictorial archives. He fishes in a pictorial reservoir peopled with another type of images: time-images swollen with sheets of time, with unexpected futures, outcome of new forces coalescing less and less in the figure of the New Man imagined by Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy and Superstudio.
Through interventions in all kinds of objets trouvés — postcards and vintage photographs — Galofaro foregrounds instead intriguing affinities with the practice of bricolage celebrated by anthropologists during a time where the scope of Architecture and Art were also being redefined. While Lévi-Strauss famously located art between Magic and Science, and the Artist between the figures of the Bricoleur and the Engineer — the former beginning with already available and existing things, the latter from a tabula rasa — Galofaro, the architect, likewise locates his photomontages in terms of a “thinking through images” and as a “kind of magic, not an art.” Galofaro’s writings and image-work invite us therefore to relocate the figure of the Architect — a figure notoriously in tension with both those of the Artist and the Engineer — in an intermediary zone and gallery of figures between the Anthropologist and the Artist. Moreover, the cinematic metaphor and concept of montage, to which some anthropologists, including myself, have always been drawn resonate with Galofaro’s reflections on his own image-work, “not as a form of artistic composition but as a tool of research to orient ourselves in the chaos of the history of forms.” At least as much, if not more than with artists, what emerged from our conversation is a conceptual and creative friendship where both the Architect and the Anthropologist can flourish together.