A Sensitive Education / Francesca Todde
Photomonitor UK | January 2021
“Similar to a metal string (the invisible) may also not vibrate and remain inert. If it vibrates, the intensity can become paroxysmal. The invisible is not to be looked for far. In fact, it may not even be encountered because it’s too close.” – Roberto Calasso, Il Viaggiatore Celeste, Adelphi, 2016.
A book of first-rate intelligence is Francesca Todde’s A Sensitive Education, spanning three years of research and photographic work. The artist’s first book takes the relationship between humans and animals as a subject and it offers an insight in the emotionally complex relationship between Tristan Plot, the bird educator, and his companions, the birds, in a constant understanding of their sensitivity and in relation to expression and behaviour codes which are different from the human ones.
The result is a flux of images of unseen gestures and silent representation as an impromptu metaphor for the increasingly fragile relationship between our day-to-day experience of our environment, and the ecosystem that sustains it.
The artist first met Tristan in Avignon, and that connection quickly turned into a threshold to investigate further the relationship between winged animals and humans.
Tristan Plot tames and coaches birds for documentary films, theater performances or ballets and therapy for inmates. His educational technique is an intersection of imprinting, traditional and “positive training”; his method is a combination of observation and respect of the unspoken existing rules between humans and animals. The photographer’s first fascination with this theme sparks from her interest in the work of Konrad Lorenz, a pioneer in the field of the physiology of animal behavior and on the development of social relationships. The result of the artist’s book goes far beyond mere documentary: deftly combining images, text and archival material within a structure of fluid storytelling, Todde’s project embraces a slow yet incisive narrative as a metaphor for the story of a sensitive experience that portrays a natural, almost secret universe, where each gesture unfolds in dilated time.
There is so much in this little book hidden from the eyes of a distracted viewer.
Holding the book in one’s hand while looking at the cover, the reader is drawn into the tactile dimension of the book. The artist wanted it to be distinctive, decisive, light but chromatically relevant and free from text. The coexistence of the two protagonists, Tristan and Bayo, the crow, highlights the secret dialogue between man and animal.
The book’s material qualities are almost akin to installation with design touches like added flat-colored pages that act as punctuation in speech or the shorter pink for the archive images that perfectly heighten the searching quality of the project.
A visual poem, carefully and finely produced in all its parts – from the unquestionable quality of the photographs to the delicate design mirroring the wordless dialogue the artist witnessed into paper language, using essential graphics and uncoated natural papers which gives to the book a tactile feeling, while preserving the depth of blacks in the images. As for the color management, Todde is focused not too much on finding the colors of birds, but the colors as birds see them (based on some recent studies on the visual range of birds). This act of trust, both in the ability of color to perturb the psychological rendering of the image and in the ability of visual perception to register tonal variations, is key when looking at the book.
Upon discovering this world, Francesca Todde wanted to tell something invisible to the eyes while she tries to learn to recognize the traces of inner manifestations, to see in gestures the reflection of feelings and intentions. Overlapping disparate yet related images, ranging from indoor and outdoor places to Tristan portraits and the birds’ close-up portraits, hers is a larger vision composed of a system of moments ultimately cognisant of the intimacy’s proclivity to both the subject and self-introspection. Throughout her work, Todde has questioned parameters within contemporary documentary practice, all the while reflecting on photography’s ability to render visible such vast and seemingly unimaginable themes.
A Sensitive Education also draws our attention to the current ecological crisis seen by some contemporary philosophers as a crisis of sensitivity. (1) This crisis is described as the impoverishment of what we can feel, perceive, and understand, and the relationships we can develop with living things. Through philosophy and art history we can sketch the genealogy of one central reason for this crisis, deeply rooted in our cosmology and cultural history: the idea that the living world is illegible and insignificant.
Francesca Todde’s A Sensitive Education is a generous revelation of the secrets that robs the work of its mystery. But it’s precisely this close collective attention to the common world that makes her work so compelling and so conceptually rich.
(1) Baptiste Morizot, Manières d’être vivants, Actes Sud 2020
A Sensitive Education by Francesca Todde was published by Départ Pour l’Image in an edition of 300.