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Curating Florence

Artist: Sorokina, Elena · b. 1991

Curating Florence

The work comprises seventy-five (x75) manipulated photographs in the form of postcards and were commenced during the artist’s Kinross Scholarship…

The work comprises seventy-five (x75) manipulated photographs in the form of postcards and were commenced during the artist’s Kinross Scholarship stay in and around Florence from mid-July to late-August 2016.

The artist discovered and read, Jacque Derrida’s book The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, during her scholarship visit and found herself adapting some of Derrida’s observations in her own method of postcard writing (originally to family and friends in a conventional postcard writing way). Derrida’s comments on the importance of the two faces of a postcard and the roles they play was also a key influence in the present work. The postcards serve as a sort of travel diary recording the visits undertaken both within Florence and to the surrounding cities. Many carry extracts from Derrida’s own writings, others are the artist’s own words penned in homage to Derrida.

The text on the verso face of 2017.008.4 surmises the aim of this artwork as follows; “This set of postcards is a set of frames of cities, delving into the way Derrida writes his frames and the way we slowly discovered Florence. Each postcard is a recording of the elements of the city, almost like stills from a film, steps from a walk, minutes from a queue.”

Most are numbered within the printed image. The postcards were produced from a computer once the artist returned to London.

© The Artist