Elena Damiani’s practice traces routes to the social and spatial present by critically engaging with scientific archives related to fields of knowledge such as geology, archaeology, and cartography. Damiani reworks found materials including books, photographs, video footage, and public records, as well as a variety of stones and minerals. These materials are extracted from their original contexts, transformed, and presented in new configurations—collages, prints, videos, installations, and sculptures—that posit fixed notions of time, space, history, territory and knowledge as psychological constructs, unfolding new memory paths and nonlinear narratives of planetary history.
The 8 minute video Brighter than the Moon is composed of found footage of nearearth objects sourced from ESA and NASA, which are crossspliced with microphotographs of meteorite samples found on Earth. Images of asteroids, meteorites, and comets are only partially shown in this work, comprising a multiscalar collage that includes large surfaces as well as microscopic details from outer space, thereby merging both into an undefined mineral landscape. By exploring the magnitude of geological scale and time, Brighter than the Moon questions dominant understandings of planetary dynamics, representations, and modes of sensing, and proposes a multiplicity of parallel realities of intersecting times and places.
