All Things Laid Dormant
All Things Laid Dormant questions the ways in which we relate to other animals, the space they occupy in our personal and collective imagination, intraspecific coexistence, and the possibility of constructing new forms of kinship and intimacy in a context of mass extinction. Articulated through a series of encounters with the non-human world mediated by the implicit ambiguity of photography, that simultaneously facilitates and hinders contact, All Things Laid Dormant is both an ode and a lament, an act of love and an expression of mourning that embodies the suffering of loss and the desire to find a place and a sense of belonging within the fragile context of our time. The images are accompanied by two hybrid creative texts, which change and take shape depending on the context in which they are presented; one is authored by the artist, the second has been written for the project by poet lee rae walsh.
BIO
Benedetta Casagrande
(1993)
Benedetta Casagrande (b.Milan, 1993) is a photographer, writer and curator based in Milan. Her artistic, curatorial and writing practice unfolds through slow research (term coined by Carolyn F.Strauss); slowness as a principle of observation, of attunement, of deceleration and constant repositioning, in an attempt to situate the human experience of the world within wider webs of relations, times and spaces. As a medium which is fundamentally based on encountering the world, she works with photography as a means of entering into a relationship with the surrounding environment and its animal, vegetable and objectual elements, through movements of proximity and distance, presence and absence, contact and loss of contact. Her work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions, including Photo Brussels Festival (2024), ADI Design Museum (Milano, 2023), 副本INSTANCE (Shanghai, 2021) and Photo Ireland
Festival (2019). She is co-founder and co-director of Ardersia Projects since 2016.