Travel notebook, 2013-2014
abrasions on photo and Braille pages
The main theme of Laura Pugno’s artistic research is visual perception as a culturally conditioned experience. In that it is the most common subject of traditional visual perception, the landscape provides the ideal domain for Pugno’s critical investigation.
In a more recent phase, these attempts at criticism of the vision were accompanied by episodes of ‘renunciation of vision’ in favor of a primitive sense like feel.
When touch plays a subordinate role to sight as with Braille, how is our reading of the world limited? Travel notebook could be the answer to this question. Thus, the original eye does not function through visual perception. Taccuini di viaggio (Travel notebook) provides an imaginary account of the wanderings of the eye which experiences reality through the sense of touch. The surfaces that the eye ‘touches’ are pages printed in Braille. Pugno rubbed a photograph she had taken herself with some sandpaper and removed the top of the raised pattern of the Braille. By so doing, she did erase a few parts of the image but, at the same time, she brought out the sources of light that remind us of the fire (the light) which, in the archaic theory of visual perception, existed inside the eye and that, on surfacing, made sight possible.