BLUE DIAMOND
2020 -2023
installation view, Maxxi Museum, 2022
Blue Diamond was born from the Green Diamond project, created between 2018 and 2020 in
Beijing, and continues narrating the story of Chinese acrobat Gao Yue’s story.
Initially employed at the Green Diamond company in Beijing to conduct experiments with sensory receptors implanted in her body, Gao Yue disappearred and was recruited by a scientific research centre that studies the relationship between humans and cetaceans. Here she was hired for her ability to adapt her body and her experience in the field of ultrasound.
Rachele Maistrello pieces together Gao Yue’s story through her diary and a series of papers, documents, photographs and notes that the acrobat collected between 2000 and 2006 and sent to her loved one, the worker Li Jian Ping. From these materials and the video we learn about her relationship with a dolphin, the physical and mental limits of neurological experiments in the marine field and the deep desire for communication between humans and aquatic specie made possible by the translation of sound frequencies.
In carrying out the research for Blue Diamond, the artist collaborated with the Jonian Dolphin Conservation, an international centre dedicated to marine biology. Here Maistrello has drawn on an archive of accredited sources and has collected sound recordings of marine ultrasounds, underwater audiovisual recordings, photographs and scientific documents and built an imaginative story founded on real bases.
In Blue Diamond, therefore, images and documents from historical and scientific sources,
aimed at proving the reliability of Gao Yue’s diary, coexist with narrative coefficients aimed a connecting fragments of different scientific discoveries.
All these elements work together in revealing the intense desire to overcome sensory as well as conceptual limits, that the artist expresses through her experimentation with the photographic language, stretched between the vocation to document and the ability to build imagery.
Blue Diamond #1, #2, c-print on Canson satin paper, 2022
Insallation view, MAXXI Museum, 2021
Blue Diamond #3, #4, c-print on Canson satin paper, 2022
Increasingly
immersed in a state of hyper-productivity,
the acceptance of our deep biological component
has become increasingly intolerable. In Blue
Diamond Rachele Maistrello investigates these basic needs, giving space to an
"emptiness" that addresses a deep and silent space of our being. Blue
Diamond is a science fiction tale that uses scientific and authorial sources to
produce a poetic and rhizomatic narrative.
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Gao Yue’s archive, silver-gelatin prints, Date unknown - 2022
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First
employed as a tester of experimental sensors at the Green Diamond factory in
Beijing at the end of the 1990s, Gao Yue got employed as a
neuroscientist-researcher at Blue Diamond company on 1999.
Through the
research she conducts on the abyss and on her own body during apnea, Gao Yue
investigates the limits and complexity of her deepest inner self.
Breathlessness,
bodily modification and contact with the marine world lead her to discover a
revelatory "emptiness," close to meditation and perceptions
experienced in the maternal womb.Despite
growing technology, humans are still part of a natural world, whose backdrop
remains obscure. Blue Diamond is an attempt to give space to this "deep
unknown" made up of frequencies, hidden perceptions and abstract images
that are part of our existence, through a work about the ocean outside and
inside us.
In the main
photo series, images obtained from scientific research are printed on cutouts
created especially for the shot. The analog photographs thus bear a double
matrix within them.
Silver
gelatin prints are contact prints, made in a darkroom by combining scientific
images printed on acetate and impressed at the printing stage. At the printing
stage, graphite drawings and lettering are new marks impressed by the light of
the enlarger.
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