[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_83

Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought, Bettina Judd, 2022

When I watched Nanette for the first time, I already had the structure of my photographic exhibition ready to present to the public; after only one hour of the show, I decided that everything I had prepared wasn't right. A concept repeated by the comedian several times throughout the show left an impression on me: the need to tell one's story properly.

Under the title “A Room of One's Own,” I collected a series of photographic shots of domestic spaces to tell the story of the women's lives there. They were ex-colleagues, friends, and relatives whose marginalized situations were invisible to society: immigrants in Italy with illegal jobs and living in precarious houses. I created a photographic story that wanted to denounce the drama of their lives through photos of their rooms. The audience responded positively when I started publishing pictures online, describing only the women's country of birth, age, and place I was photographing. Still, most people were struck by the shots' beauty, not by their message. How come? Because I wasn't telling the story correctly.

I was reminded of a phrase by Dorothy Allison that struck me: “Behind the story I tell is the one I don't.” Was there, in my case, too, a story that I wasn't telling or that I didn't want to tell? Was that the story that didn't reach the audience? Comparing the photos I had chosen with those I had discarded, I realized that most of the saved shots were photos with powerful light and colors, but none of them represented the entire room, just objects and details. Asking myself why, I figured out it was because the whole room would tell too much.

In creating the collection of photos, I eliminated the crudest shots, those that showed the entire space's actual condition of discomfort, favoring instead a more poetic language made up of suggestive shots of objects. That is, I made a censorship. Behind my choice was not only my aesthetic taste but also, above all, the fear of making those who looked at the photos uncomfortable. As Hannah Gadsby notes, I, too, understood that pushing the public into a situation of discomfort, exposing them, in my case, to an unsettling vision, was a dangerous operation both for the public and for myself.

Putting other people in a "non-safe space" means taking on the role of someone who destroys an expectation of safety. Even when you desire to denounce an injustice or convey the truth behind this discomfort, you take on the role of a "killjoy" person (Ahmed, 2023). The desire to remain within a safe situation, a so-called comfort zone, corresponds to our desire to feel good and happy. I use the word happiness precisely because “even when we want different things, it is assumed we all want happiness. Happiness becomes a “container for the diversity of humans wants”(Ahmed, 2023: 94). What we define as "good" is always something that is in the direction of our happiness; on the contrary, everything that threatens it is defined as “bad.”

The photograph of a still life inside a painter's atelier can evoke memories of old Flemish paintings or the romantic fascination for bohemian creative spaces, but it does not threaten our happiness. Photographing the entire atelier as a dark, damp garage is already less popular. If this same garage is shown as an inhabited house, where the toilet and stove are in the same corner hidden by a dark curtain, then the photo puts the viewer in a "non-safe space" because it places them in front of a reality of discomfort without filters.

As Maria Lugones reminds us, being at ease means feeling good in your reality, but those who feel good in their reality often do not cultivate interest in the realities of others. Being at ease is as dangerous as putting other people in a position of discomfort because it does not allow you to travel through the "worlds" of others: it does not allow you to identify with others, nor to understand or love them; it does not give the possibility of becoming a different person. Being at ease means seeking and accepting normative happiness, submitting to its rules or, as in my case, applying them: the photos I had posted online corresponded to this expectation. They didn't show discomfort; they didn't make you feel uncomfortable.

I asked myself why I had created the “A Room of One's Own” project; why had I collected all that material and then censored it? I realized that behind my photographic storytelling motivation; there wasn't so much the desire to denounce but rather a feeling of love towards what I was photographing, representing the reality I come from and the people I'm linked to.

It is a complex feeling that includes my sense of belonging and identity, a massive part of my past and my present; a feeling that tells the history of my emotions and the geography of my relationships since it contains the traces of what I have experienced as a colleague, as a friend, as a cousin, as a daughter. It is a feeling that contains all the “travel” I have made in the various “worlds” I have known. But it is not only the result of all this "world-traveling"; it is also a constant exercise in

discomfort because, as Bell Hooks says: "The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control” (hooks, 2018: 185). Being connected to others and loving them means living in a fragile place that doesn't always protect you from the lousy weather that affections may cause. I realized that although I was used to traveling different "worlds" and living with the anxieties that love entails, I was not willing to subject the spectator to the same tension. Why? Why wasn't I telling the story correctly? Was I, as Bettina Judd asks, running away from the feelin'?

In part, yes.Photographing degraded spaces that tell the story of an invisible precarious situation is a complex process of knowledge production, "the knowledge produced in the 'delirium of a felt life'"(Judd, 2022: 6), not simple documentation. But what if that same invisible precariousness also represents the very reality you live in? The knowledge you are producing will also be imbued with your history and feelings: it stops being complex work; it becomes complex and painful. Or, as Bettina Judd suggests: “[an] internal and complex sensation entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy.”

Why do I avoid tension for the viewer? Because I struggle to manage it myself.

Why do I cut the photo? Because it says too much of what I'm unwilling to tell.

I don't tell the story of a deep and unresolved anger: that of the people who inhabit those spaces and mine. And I don't want to give this anger to others, just as it is - a dark, dirty room saturated with stacked objects - to break their comfort. As Gadsby says at the end of her show, I don't want to “spread anger” because anger is tension. And tension doesn’t make people feel good. This is not the love that I was taught, and that, I think, is the one that pushes me to tell stories to change the worlds I don’t like. But I also don't want to move within the limited

perimeter of normative happiness created by others for others. A “conditional happiness” leads to presenting what we believe the public wants. Even when what they want is our invisibility. Lorde says that “anger, expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future, is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” Still, that is true only if you have found a way to live with it or have managed to move beyond your anger to look at it from afar. When you are still trapped inside your feelings, anger becomes “the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood and that you are not worthy of being understood” (hooks, 2004: 44).

I don't know if I'm a prisoner of my anger, but I fear it. Fear of misusing it: of upsetting those I want to help, of pushing away those I want to bring closer. I have read Lorde's article on the uses of this feeling many times, and every time, one point of her speech continues to strike me as much as the first: “We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty.” I believe this “excavating honesty” is the “proper telling” I was looking for.

I started out thinking of delivering a photographic storytelling work on the invisibility of women living in disadvantaged social situations, and I realized how I, with my work, was contributing to continuing their invisibility. Instead of selecting large-field photos of entire rooms, dark and degraded as they appear to those who enter them, I delivered a selection of still-lifes with a romantic slant that idealized the spaces, making them muffled and nostalgic. The complexity of emotions that constituted my strong motivational impulse also prevented me from achieving the purpose of my work: the love that drove me to document the spaces was as strong as the anger towards the injustice that those same spaces represent. I didn't want to relive all the contrasting emotions that those realities brought to light. So I only chose the “harmless” shots, realizing that I, too, like the public I’ve talked about, wanted to remain in comfort, experience normative happiness, and see beautiful photos, even when those same photos were mine and the stories they were telling were, instead, very sad. I wondered if this was a betrayal or simply one of the many compromises that life throws at you and if there was a difference between compromise and betrayal. I decided it didn't matter.

I understand that to tell the story properly, I need to excavate with honesty, even if I am afraid of what is found, even if what is found makes the world and myself uncomfortable. What I have to do with the findings of this excavation can be decided with a bit of compassion, which is love towards both the work and the audience, and with a bit of courage, which is what it takes to move beyond anger. I have started publishing photos of the entire spaces in addition to the photos of the various details.