Eleonora Agostini (b.1991) is an Italian artist based in London. She received her BA in Photography from Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan and she is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art MA Photography programme. Eleonora works at the intersection between photography, performance and sculpture and her practice is driven by her interest in the reconsideration and redefinition of the everyday.
Her most recent series, A Blurry Aftertaste, consists in a collection of photographs and sculpture that consider the complexity of the domestic space, by questioning relationship powers in her family and the role of labour within the borders of the home. Previous works include A Study on Wait(ress)ing, a reflection on labour, visibility and rituals, One Must Imagining Him Happy, an observation of nonnarrative
domestic scenes, and Something is Missing, an exploration of the ideas of temporality and transition.
Eleonora has exhibited in Britain, Italy and the United States. Recent exhibitions include A Blurry Aftertaste, displayed at Premio Francesco Fabbri in Italy, PingYao Photography Festival and Photo Hasting (2018), There is No Threat (New York 2018) and A Day Like The Others (Window 187, London 2018).
A Blurry Aftertaste focuses on the objects, activities and surfaces that belong to the domestic space, portrayed as an absurd and uncanny theatre defined by the creation of structures and the repetition of labour. Working at the intersection between photography, performance and sculpture, Eleonora is interested in alluding to that which is beneath the surface and discover a possible fracture and new meanings within our contemporary domestic experience. The house becomes a place where memories can be reconstructed, where intimacy and claustrophobia exist simultaneously, and a platform where she can translate the gestures of everyday memories into new scenarios performed for the camera.
The images operate both as observational and directed performance through a collaborative approach between her and her parents, allowing to explore notions of comfort, tension and labour. Images such as Relaxation Island displays a pile of objects deprived of their functionality as resting apparatus. The furniture that comes in contact with the body is used as a tool of labour through the arrangement of a temporary tower constructed and balanced by her parents. The creation and documentation of precarious structures that exists between the strange and the mundane is used to identify the significance of a house emptied from its belongings, and to explore the boundaries between her and her family.
Although everything happens inside the perimeter of the house, the suggestion of an outside space is visible in most of the images. The borders of the home have been repetitively photographed to underline the dimension that exists between the private and the public, that given its ambivalent status functions both as closure and opening. Alongside the images, the sculpture A Cast Of a Crumpled Pillow extends and compliments key areas of inquiry which are at play within the photographs, such as structure, weight, function, rest and surfaces. The appearance of the sculpture as soft opposed to the hard properties of its materiality evokes the illusion of comfort often present in suburban dwellings.
A Blurry Aftertaste is an attempt to better understand the precariousness of the notion of home through the action of balancing objects, and resisting gravity, the positions of power and the switch of roles that are at play within the images and during the making process.
