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Alisa Martynova: "Nowhere near" – A photographic exploration of migration (Interview in English)

14.01.2024 31 min

Zusammenfassung & Show Notes

Alisa Martynova is a Russian photographer living in Italy, who has been focusing on the topic of migration. Her project, titled „Nowhere Near,“ aims to capture the essence of being a migrant and explore the feelings of isolation and uncertainty that come with it.

"Through photography I try to get to the core of how the world works and functions." Alisa Martynova

"I actually think that migration as the primordial state of the human beings that want to move forward and want to explore things, want to evolve and contribute." Alisa Martynova

This interview was recorded during the media days of Europe's biggest open air fotofestival "La Gacilly – Baden Photo" in August, 2023.

Alisa Martynova on the internet:

Website

Instagram

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Transkript

It's been five years that I'm working on this project about African migration in Europe. I ask myself a lot of times, what is that that attracts me? I actually think that migration as the primordial state of the human beings that want to move forward and want to explore things, want to evolve and contribute. Music. To different cultures and blend with different cultures. And that's the way I try to present it in my project. The photos are still in the archive and will be published in the coming weeks. Today the conversation with Alisa Martinova and about Alisa it is called in the festival catalog. Alisa Martinova comes from Russia and lives in Italy, where she studied photography. Since 2018, Martinova has been dealing with the topic of migration. With the people who come to Italy via the Mediterranean. A study by the International Organization for Migration from 2016 calls the most important causes of escape, including lack of security, war conflicts, sexual, social or religious discrimination. The numbers are frightening. In 2021 alone, over 4,400 migrants came to live on the Mediterranean. Sie kommen aus Nigeria, Gambia oder der Elfenbeinküste. Für viele von ihnen endet der Traum in Libyen, wo Folter, Sklaverei und Vergewaltigung zum Alltag gehören. Wer es über das Mittelmeer schafft, kämpft weiter mit der Angst, die die Flucht und die Gefahren auf der Reise ausgelöst haben. Auf der Suche nach einem Ort, an dem sie leben und sich niederlassen können, reiten sie im Verborgenen. Jeder dieser Menschen hat seine eigene Geschichte und seinen Antlitz, doch alle verbindet ein gemeinsames Schicksal. Alle sind junge Afrikaner, die sich Individualität und Diversität bewahrt haben, im Strudel der Globalisierung jedoch oft vergessen werden. Nach der langen Passage über das Meer werden sie zu Sternen, die in der Nacht vergehen und ein Sternbild formen. In ihren Unterschieden und Ähnlichkeiten verkörpern sie alle einen Traum, einen gemeinsamen Horizont, für dessen Erreichen jeder bereit ist, einen kleinen Teil von sich selbst aufzugeben. Heute leben über eine Million Afrikaner legal in Italien. So much for the background of Alicia Martinova. You will hear her again at the beginning of this episode in her own words, as she stands in front of her pictures at the Artist Walk, i.e. The tour with all photographers, through the exhibition and speaks about her project Noel Neal. This is also the subject of the following interview that we conducted with her in the hotel. Yes, then I would say, let's get right into the interview with Alisa Martinova. Have fun! It's your turn. Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Alisa Martinova. I hope I pronounced it correctly. You do. Thank you. Well, hello, everyone. It's great to see you here. And my exhibition is called Nowhere Near. I'll closely explain this, the title to you. And the project is about African migration in Europe and it was made both in Italy and France through the years and it's an ongoing project so it will continue and the thing that I decided to work on is mostly the feeling of how it is to be a migrant rather than a news story because there were already very good photographers who worked on this in the reportage way so I decided to approach the story in a different way So I spent a lot of time without actually taking the pictures, just talking to people, talking to the migrants and the people who work with them. And at some point, one of them told me this very interesting thing. And they told me that when they migrated and when they tried to settle in Italy, they felt themselves in sort of a bubble, in a cultural bubble and linguistic bubble, because they didn't know the language. They didn't know the behavioral norms of society. And sometimes their friendly behavior towards other people was interpreted in the opposite way. And I decided to see how I could represent this feeling of being in a bubble, but through photography. And in a way that could touch many people, could touch different people who even never had the experience of migration. And at this point, I thought of the metaphor of the stars and interstellar travel. So the project stands on these two feet. One is the African culture. So you could see it in colors. You could see it in clothing. You could see it in the elements, in the recurring elements of the project. But the other part is this feeling, is this, again, this sort of dream about the stars, the stars guiding your way through. Because, again, a lot of traveling is happening at night. And here comes the title Nowhere Near which in English is actually expresses this state which is a non-state feeling that is a non-feeling and place that is a non-place which is very important in the understanding of this feeling it's a very controversial combination of different feelings being a migrant so I thought that that metaphor could combine all of them. And one of the inspirations was also the dreams of those people because I asked them about their recurring dreams if they had any strange dreams that came at night because again while talking to them I tried not to speak straightforwardly about the experience of crossing but mostly again about speaking about their dreams or their home country So you could see a lot of landscapes were inspired by the visions of the dreams of these people and also by their home country. So by the landscapes that might have been found in their home country. And what else can I say? A lot of pictures are symbols. So again, and I was trying to bring this symbology of African culture, a tradition, and this feeling of being a migrant. So this connection to the stars. And again, migration seen as a primordial feeling and as a primordial state of human beings. Because again, it's something that's been forgotten very often. But the human beings, they always travel, they always migrate, and that's how the cultures evolved, and that's a natural state of a human being. And so that's something that, again, through this connection to the stars and to these African traditions, which are very much connected to Earth and natural elements, I tried to represent in the project. And for example you could see that picture of a desert rose that's sort of a perfect symbol of combining these two traditions because this is a crystal that can be found in the arid conditions where sometimes migrants come from, in countries like Libya but then it also resembles this sort of an interstellar body. So a crystal And then the stories of different people, I tried to approach different people with different stories, different backgrounds, different countries. So they're not only the migrants who came by sea, but also the migrants who came for economical reasons. And again, the colors, for example, the choice of colors, there's a lot of red because in African traditions, red is considered both as a color that stands for danger and death and blood, but also the courage. And, again, that's something that I wanted to manifest in the project, that these people have a lot of courage and a lot of power and a lot of force to undertake the journey that is, again, perilous, full of uncertainties, full of being nowhere. And I think it's great to manifest the culture and the courage of those people. Thank you. Thank you, Alisa, for sharing this with us. Yes, that was Alicia Martinova in her own words, a few words about her project Nowhere Near, which she showed at the last Festival La Garcilla in Baden-Württemberg. You also heard Lois Lammhuber, the festival director of Europe's largest open-air photo festival. Now we continue with the conversation that Thomas B. Jones and I later led, in which we will deepen the subject of her project Nowhere Near and also go into why migration has become the core focus of her photographic work. Have fun! Okay, Alisa, let's get started. Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. Thank you very much for inviting me. Really happy to be here. Yeah, we're here at the Photo Festival in Baden. Yesterday, we went on the tour to see all the exhibitions here of all the artists and also your exhibition here, Nowhere Near. year. Before we talk about that and what's about this body of work, Alisa, I'd like to ask, how did you get started with photography in the first place? When did you discover that taking pictures was your way of telling stories? Right, thank you. Well, actually, when I was at school in Russia, because I was born in Russia and raised there and I used to act in a theater but it was an experimental theater so we worked a lot with image and movement not words but metaphors and symbolic representation of things and I had a friend of mine who wanted to be a photographer and she and at some point I I, like by acting in theatre, I was thinking about becoming actually a director, a theatre director. And at some point I was with this friend of mine who just recently bought the camera and she asked me to take a picture of hers. And when I took the camera in my hands, I thought that it actually felt like directing. So it felt like staging and it felt like very much connected to theatre, very much connected connected to, I don't know, poetry of the moment. And yeah, I think that was my first taste of photography. And then, again, when I was quitting theatre at my university. And I wanted to be a film director. So I had a lot of ideas. And at the moment, I was watching a lot of films. And I was actually very much into films, into filmmaking. And accidentally, I was planning to have a workshop in Prague and filmmaking. And I just had some spare money and some spare time and just decided that, okay, I'll just travel somewhere else. And I chose Italy. to me and uh i accidentally chose florence because rome was too big for me and uh and there i took a course in duck room photography and that was the moment when i fell in love with photography because um it was it seemed magic and it seemed uh it seemed alchemy it was very material it was very much um something that uh you would do with your hands like developing and printing photographs in the darkroom and um and it felt I felt that there was a lot of potential in it and just felt it was and also comparing to filmmaking it was much easier because you didn't have to have a big crew you didn't have to have uh expensive equipment to do it so I just um yeah the first it was just a chance just this random encounters and then when I um applied for a photography program in Florence that's yeah that's just how it started and I'm still here. Are you still using analog cameras in your photography not really because now it's just for the question of convenience II just I used to shoot with analog camera on my first and second year in photography school. And it taught me a lot. I really liked it. I really liked the alternative processes of printing. And I really like the way analog photography teaches you to choose the subject and to be slow in taking the picture. And it gets you, it just gives you the responsibility or it makes you aware of the responsibility of making a shot, right? because you only have a limited number of frames. And yeah, but then I switched because I started to work with artificial lighting. And it was just easier in the beginning to work with artificial lighting because you could see the result immediately. And then I just continued, right? Well, once you found your medium into photography as your way to express your whatever you wanted to say then the question is what kind of stories do you want to tell how did you get to find your subjects you know the things that you wanted to point your camera at it's an interesting question because i i ask myself about it and i don't really really find the answer but um it again it has something to do with how I started photography and how I approached art in the beginning because again I went through theater I went through films and uh only that I went to photography and um in the beginning when I was making um photography photography I was very personal so I was talking about myself and about my feelings, and when I went on and on the second year of school we had this approach to the documentary photography so that's where I sort of switched and I thought that and at some point you can't talk about yourself anymore because I mean unless there's something in there or I mean and there are many good photographers who do it, but that was just not for me. But still, by speaking about other people, I feel that I somehow speak about myself, or at least about things that I don't maybe fully understand in the beginning or something that I would like to come closer to, something that becomes me, something that helps me to understand more about the world I live in, something that connects me to different people, something that... I don't know. It's just, it's interesting because like doing photography and art in general, it's about, it's a relationship with your mind as well, like with something that interests your mind. And you don't, you don't always know why it is that. So sometimes it's just subconscious. and in the topic of migration for example because it's been five years that I'm working on this project about African migration in Europe and I ask myself a lot of times what is that that attracts me and I actually think that the way migration and the story of migration migration is the ultimate thing about the human being like it's the ultimate state of human beings and uh that's the way i try to present it in my project like migration as the primordial state of the human beings that uh want to move forward and want to explore things want to evolve and contribute to different cultures and blend with different cultures so um i think uh right when i When I was trying to find like what's actually, what is my main interest in photography and I came to this reflection that it's actually about the universal themes. Just that through photography, I try to get to the core of how the world works and functions. And that's what I find fascinating about it because photography gives you this opportunity. Yeah, right. right with migration it's a quite wide topic and once you've you know identified your interest in this topic you have to find an angle to tackle it and to whatever uh translate it into images that represent your idea of your your point of view how you want to um what you want to tell about the migration and the topic of migration how did you go about that to find to narrow it down to a concept that now can be seen in your series nowhere near right um well that was um, i spent a lot of time without um taking pictures so i was just talking to people i was reading a lot i was uh watching films i was reading articles and books and i was just trying to explore the topic from all the different sides of it and that's how i usually approach uh the new project I just really do a very deep research and while I was talking to people, I talked to migrants a lot of course and to the people who work with them, like psychologists and the people who help them in the reception centers and journalists and from the conversation of. Sorry. And I had this conversation with one of the migrants and he told me that when he moved to Italy, he had this feeling of being in a bubble, like cultural bubble and linguistic bubble. And because some of the behavioral norms of the society, which is a strange thing to say, but they were different. And when he was trying to approach people in a friendly way, he was misinterpreted. And um and you know my the story of migration is a lot about time about waiting about being in this sort of suspended place in a limbo almost and um that's uh when i decided um from following all this conversation as i decided to focus on that feeling of being a migrant because uh that's also also something that was missing in the main narrative then there was a lot of very good photojournalistic work on the matter which informs people but at some point what happens with the subject and it happened a lot of times in the history of photography with war photography for example when spectators and readers when they are sort of bombarded with all this very very very crude, very violent images. At some point, it serves the point that it informs and it is very important to have this kind of narrative. But at some point in time, it creates a barrier between the spectator and, I mean, the receiver of the imagery and the subject. And it doesn't work anymore to create a connection. And that is something that was important for me in my work. I wanted to create the connection between the people who never went through the experience of migration and between the people who had this experience. And that's why I chose the metaphor of the interstellar travel. Travel and because it's uh like if you think about um the space it's the ultimate metaphor of the controversial feelings right of being nowhere near because the title of the project nowhere near it's um exactly something that um that um notes the the feeling which is a non-feeling in the a place which is a non-place and then if you think about the space it's something that that makes us feel fascinated but it's also something that makes us feel scared it's the ultimate metaphor of the unknown of the future. Also about the past because that's where everything comes from right so and that's something that I felt was very true for the migration because a lot of people were speaking about these controversial feelings of being it's they're following a dream but they don't know what is in there what what is in there for them they have their past they have their traditions and have their roots but at some point they also in the new environment they reject their roots sometimes or they try to manifest their roots so it's always a very complex feeling it's a very complex uh phenomena and um what is the most complex thing in the world probably the world itself so that's why i decided to connect it to space yeah interesting that you say that uh in the first place there was quite some time that you spent without touching the camera just doing some investigation talking to people and and then developing an idea of what the project eventually is gonna be gonna look like and to it's been quite a long way to get to the point where you actually took the first image right because uh it's again it's the stereotype because everybody thinks that photographers uh they take images all the time and they have they They always have the camera hanging from their neck. And it's true for some kind of photographers and it's good for their practice. But on my way, I feel that I very much need the research and I actually need to... I mean, some pictures, they become intuitively, but they still follow the concept. And I don't know. Again, it's a very mysterious thing with photography and with projects in general because you actually, you never know when, I mean, you are looking for something, right? But you don't know what you find and you don't know at which point you will find it. And then your brain, I mean, at least as I understand, my brain works, it just gathers a lot of information and then it makes connections. And I can't predict what the connection will be in the beginning but i really need this time of the research and even i also need the time when i am i did the research and then i stop and i just leave it there and then when my mind is free it it is free to make the connections with the things that matter and yeah i think that's it That's just how it works. And the project was done, all the images of the projects were taken in Italy or did you, where was it? Some pictures were taken in Italy. Some pictures were taken in France because in Italy, I worked in Tuscany. So again, I didn't go to the place where the migrants actually arrive because I was mostly interested in the feeling of being a migrant. So it was more a contemplative research and mostly constructing the world through the narratives and taken the metaphors and symbols from the stories and then when I finished the project in Italy I was selected for a artist in residency program and Davila in plunge contact festival and that's how I continued the project in Normandy but then again I it's I didn't again in In Normandy, I didn't go to Calais, but I was working around and I was working with even established migrants. And then that's how I found out this question of origins, that some of them were actually rejecting their origins and they wanted to become European, French, because they wanted to blend with a new environment. And some of them were actually manifesting their origins. So a lot of the imagery, they come from the research again, because I was asking a lot of people about their recurring dreams, about their home country. So all the landscape, they sort of embody this process of speaking about the space, but also speaking about the earth, the African culture, and being very, very connected to nature. And yeah, and then the travel and the seaside. So I was just trying to sort of create an imagery. So it wasn't actually important where I was, but the people were important and it's mostly, I was, I mean, you know, It's a very interesting thing because when I was back in Russia, I studied at university and I studied philology and I wrote my thesis on romanticism and romantic poetry. And there's a very interesting thing in that landscape in poetry, in romantic poetry, works as a mirror of the soul and feelings of the main character. And this is something that I wanted to bring to this work about migration. Like, again, it's not a reportage, right? But it's more, it could be a reportage, but about thoughts and the inner landscape that the people have inside. And that was somehow the representation of the feelings, like the visual representation of the feelings. Interesting. interesting um where can people find or see the images uh on on your website or what is the best place to yeah have a visual impression of what we're talking about right uh you can go to my website or instagram because that's the place where where the pictures leave now and uh and And I'm quite happy that the project is still traveling and I will be heading for a new part in the UK. And in September, actually, the project will be exhibited again in Kuala Lumpur, then in Helsinki. And then I'm really happy that it actually lives and people can have a chance to see it live, not only in the internet, because I also feel that the projects, they need to be seen live. In reality, because that's a different thing, because it also helps to establish the relationship with the photograph and the subject on the photograph and the spectator. It's a very different experience from the website, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a very, very unique way of tackling this topic of migration, the way you did it in your series with lots of thoughts in them and to, yeah, kind of abstract it a little little bit from the the images that we are used to see about uh portraying migrants and and what they are going through right to to use metaphors and to to yeah put it into a broader uh spectrum and uh so that it's relatable to to all of us because these interstellar journeys and all the fundamental questions that we are asking ourselves of where we are going and so it it all it's all within us so we can relate to it right yeah that's exactly what i was trying to work on so i'm happy that that actually fails yeah thank you thank you very much alisa it was a pleasure to to see your work here get in contact with it uh and then have the chance to talk about it with you all the best of luck for your future projects and um yeah thank you very much again thank you very much. It was great to talk to you. Thank you for your questions. Ja, das war das Interview mit Alisa Martinova, aufgenommen am Rande der Medientage des vergangenen Fotofestivals La Gacili Baden Foto und weitere Interviews, nicht nur von der letztjährigen Ausgabe von Europas größtem Fotofestival, sondern auch von den vorherigen, findest du im Archiv bei Gate7. Hör da gerne auch nochmal rein. Vielen Dank fürs Zuhören und auf bald. Dein Kai.