On the Other Shore series

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes
Marcel Proust

Constanza Piaggio's present work, On the Other Shore, consists of one video and a series of seven pictures, which take us to the unique landscape found near what became her temporary home for three months, the Artists Residence Gyeonggi Creation Center in South Korea.

Confronted with a new territory which has its own language and codes, she tries through a visual language to go beyond the barriers of the unknown, looking to expand the limits of her closest world and to build a meeting point where understanding is possible.

By means of an intense exploration of the small island of Daebu, the artist makes it possible to assimilate the scenery and its codes, thus giving us a certain feeling of closeness. Her fix shot videos and her delicate pictures go all over diaphanous horizons, mysterious shipwrecks, suggestive fruits and rice fields moving slowly, allowing us to come along with her in her discoveries.

These fixed images, where time extends until it melts into a deep meditation, look to connect us both with the scenery and with what the artist isn't able to filter through the camera. That is why the video is not subtitled: it puts into evidence the impossibility of the language and the fragmentation of the information. The artist recorded three people reading in Korean, thinking and telling stories about their country, their literature, their landscapes or their own lives. On one side, there is a girl reading an extract from the famous historical novel Toji (The Land) , by Korean writer Park Kyung-ni. On the other, the reasons why Choi Chun Il decided to write his book The Tidal Flats of Bay of Gyeonggi-do and some life stories of a peasant woman from that region.

Depending on the context where the video is exhibited, the sound amplifies the meaning of the work. If exhibited in Korea, the different stories fuse with the images, enriching each other. Yet, the Hanja language won't be understood anymore if it crosses the border, where it will get another meaning. The language will accompany the images as part of an aesthetic experience, creating an exciting empathy between the members of the audience and the artist’s experience in this remote Asian peninsula.

As Paul Strand said “Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own”. The possibilities of coming across the unknown are infinite, but the vision that finds that unknown has to be always fresh and sharp, because it's only through the oddness that new eyes can be born. In this way, Constanza Piaggio relates her life and her art, and places herself in this foreign world looking to create new links between the audience and the experience of being On The Other Shore.

Carolina Castro