Linda Pagani

Linda Pagani (Boston, USA) and Federica Pamio (Milan, Italy) have been working collaboratively as Lin.Fe since first meeting at an artists’ residency in southern Italy in 2015. Through their work together, Pamio and Pagani forge conversations between body, architecture, and nature, studying the human form and how it interacts with its environment, both natural and artificial.

linfa [ feminine ] /’linfa/ sap.

Prompted by an inquiry into the need for regeneration in forgotten areas of cities, in this body of work the artists utilize abandoned buildings and structures in their urban environment as canvases for possibility. The photographs are presented as a fusion of architectural drawings with photographic imagery. The building returns to its purest form, removing the factors of time, neglect, and destruction that humans and the environment have wreaked on its skeleton and facade. The resulting montage suggests a rebirth through the introduction of nature and human touch. As nature reclaims its space, society is tasked to preserve and care for what it constructs.

n’est nest is a series of photographs constructed of multiple images that each artist captured in her respective shelter-in-place amidst the initial Covid quarantine in 2020. The artists shared a visual dialogue of solitude and distance, all the while creating an intimate connection. Limited to working with what surrounded them and what they were forced to live every day, they thought of escape. The static nature of isolation was disrupted by gestures, movements and relationships with their beloved and despised nests, weaving individual experiences into a common one.

Find me at the border is a body of work that begins as a performance and continues through photography.

Captivated by the local landscape and architecture, the artists, collectively known as Lin.Fe, create narratives through performative acts in the environment. Investigating abandoned structures by bicycle through the countryside of southern Italy, they explore the land and insert themselves into old structures, creating an alternative story of time and place.

A balance of subject and environment is improvised according to location, with discovery an important part of their practice. By placing the human figure in staged relationships with abandoned buildings in their rural settings, the artists examine the nearly invisible line that acts as border between artificial structures and the natural world.

Every action contributes to the process. Over a period of twenty days the pair traverses the countryside of a small section of Puglia in Italy. The daily ritual begins with an itinerary set the night before, an early morning wake up, and cameras strapped to backs. A new town awaits their arrival by borrowed bicycles - coffee, hellos to the locals, a separation to have their independent experiences of the place, reconnection and a return to their castle. It is the ‘in-betweens', the borders between towns, where their collective observations are shaped into a play between a female protagonist, an abandoned structure, and the land.

Mane is a body of work that investigates the discourse between humanity and terrain. The artists weave themselves into the landscape and abandoned architecture suggesting both a surrender and a struggle.