Every being is an island (2020), is a visual atlas that includes large scale photographic works, a video and a collection of found objects recollected during daily walks at The Deering Estate, for almost a year (minus 3 months of COVID-19 strict quarantine), while being an Artist in Residence. Deering Estate is a patrimonial estate that englobes what was the Miami home to Charles Deering, a vast land of a hardwood subtropical forest, a manicured and designed garden and the water opening to Miami’s Bay.
I began organically shooting outdoors, mainly small locations that were interesting: a little mangrove island, the artist rock that Richard Murdoch installed, the shell clusters on rocks, the manatees, in the initial phase. My idea was to create a personal archive, to think on how we find and observe the small, apparently irrelevant or apparently unimportant things, that conform a specific body/place/entity. My interest for Curiosity Cabinets, science and collections have made me build a non-academic, loosely documentary archive of the natural world and our complex relation with it.
The project has unfolded in different ways, and through diverse paths, but basically it deals with the idea of confirming the mere existence of it, and of us, the observation of nature, the construction of an archive, document as a fiction and lastly, of the idea of ‘being in the middle of ‘things’ after Mieke Bal’s notion of cultural analysis.
As my project developed, I progressively began more interested in how Florida’s natural landscape has been determined by its Sub tropical weather conditions and how human and culture have blended into “modeling” site specific locations. This controlled environment has presented itself as a living observation laboratory. Inspirations for this project include both Charles Torrey Simpson’s naturalist observations from Lower Florida Wilds published in the 1920s and Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne (1923-29) in relation to the studies of image accumulations as a way of experiencing and interpreting memory and the familiar. I was also inspired Merlau Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), as well as the Baudelarian notion of Correspondence, which is a concept that I have previously developed in other works. Additionally, further inspiration and research done with Georges Didi-Huberman’s Lo que vemos, lo que nos mira (1992), Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (1991), The invention of Nature (Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World) by Andrea Wulf (2015), in the process of this project.
© amalia caputo studio, 2023