Annamalagrida

Typically, Anna Malagrida takes up the position of a voyeuse who is always peeking through windows from up close or afar to see what is going on behind the intervening panes of glass that represent the barrier between the public and the private sphere. Or so it would seem. The opacity or transparency of windows in a modern building and the lack of curtains or use of them is a reflection on the contemporary human condition. It has also been a subject of painting since Renaissance times, reaching its highpoints with Johannes Vermeer and Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez where mirrors and windows opened up perspectives into interior dimensions of the soul and offered up commentary from people beyond the frame or, in the case of partial reflections or desilvered, imperfect mirrors, a little of both at the same time.
Not all is what it seems, however. Malagrida has a sharp eye for detail and a sense of humor that puts life back into the most abandoned of scenes. In her more recent work shot on the fringes of Cadaqués, a Mediterranean town famous for its Dalí museum she depicts how humans have, temporarily at least, reclaimed and marked as their own an illegally built apartment project. In Point de Vue (Point of View, 2006), takes as her point of departure a Club Mediterranée resort built during the anything-goes boom recently fading from memory. The buildings, constructed too close to the water’s edge, represented the highpoint of go-go capitalism and its attempts to produce faits accomplis by bribing politicians and construction companies. In this case, Club Med was stopped and the buildings abandoned, presumably to be torn down.
The title Malagrida uses, Point de Vue, plays on a double meaning in French. At once referring to the position and perspective or viewpoint of the viewer, it also means little to view. As can be seen in the images taken from within the buildings—a reversal of Malagrida’s usual approach—the structures are alarmingly close to the water’s edge. In their abandonment, the buildings have been taken over by an unseen human presence like something out of one of J. G. Ballard’s dystopias set on the Mediterranean coast. Dust has settled on the inside of the windows and salt spray and dirt on the outside. Various unseen people have left their marks, literally, on both surfaces by scrawling with their fingertips love notes, drawings, tags, and political graffiti. These artifacts of unseen authors reclaim the buildings into personal narratives not seen in the corporate structures of the big cities that are reflected in her previous work. These images are more powerful because they denote a willingness to control rather than be controlled by the structures and the systems that produce them. The subtlety of Malagrida’s vision is expressed in the very transparency of her unseen subjects’ human acts as they seek to reassert themselves against a crushing anonymity.