Wunderkammer: Lara Gasparotto

Every week, AGENDA goes in search of the sound & vision of Brussels. But it is not the edgy bustle of the city that inspires the young photographer Lara Gasparotto. Her intimate pictures focus on everyday life and the vulnerability of humanity and nature.

Although she has lived in Brussels for the last six years and is always associated with Liège, where she was born and studied photography, 26-year-old Lara Gasparotto is a country girl. But one who wanted to become an explorer. “I grew up in Comblain-au-Pont, a village in the woods in the Condroz valley in the province of Liège,” she tells us in her cosy penthouse apartment in Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek. “That’s where my love of landscape and of adventure took shape. I have always felt good in the countryside.”
Photography wasn’t an early choice. “Family photographs were part of everyday life, but photography wasn’t a passion. I never thought I would make it my job – until they told me at school that I had talent and that ‘I really must keep it up’.”
As she found it hard to decide what to study, friends initially recommended the film school in Brussels. “But because I didn’t have much technical knowledge, I didn’t feel I was ready for the admission test. Then someone said, ‘Maybe do a year of photography first, and then decide.’” In the end, Gasparotto did the whole three years, and since then she has been one of the rising stars of Belgian photography.

Gasparotto has kept her feet on the ground. She tells us, soberly, that she recently raised her prices, in consultation with her gallery – a question of supply and demand. The pictures in question, both in colour and in black-and-white, are not that easy to fathom: they have layers of feeling and meaning. “Lots of people of my generation go in for clever series: they go on a long journey and come back with an exhibition and a book; but I don’t actually have a plan at all.”

When she comes back from Cambodia, for example, or China or the US, all she has is a bunch of individual photographs. The link between them is instinctive, not thematic. “Yes, I like photographing natural landscapes and girls, often nudes. But doesn’t one follow from the other? What they have in common is a certain fragility. My figures are often quite beautiful, but at the same time they are also vulnerable and melancholy. The same goes for my landscapes, which maybe won’t be there any more tomorrow. That finiteness has something sacred for me.”

The figures in her pictures are mainly friends of hers. “It is convenient and it also makes my photography unique, or at least more intimate and honest than a series with people you have no connection with. This way, it is easier for me to play with the points of contact between reality and fiction. My pictures appear to be part of a mysterious world, but as you can see my life here in Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek is far from being a mystery with beautiful nude girls everywhere.” [Laughs]

They are well hidden away, alright. We do notice two timid kittens, Yokai and Arsouille, one friend, also a photographer, and lots of books, photographs, and cameras. “There is actually a lot of shame in my nudes,” observes Gasparotto. “They are often slightly staged. Sometimes you don’t see the face very clearly. I’m not interested in voyeurism. Those beautiful girls just capture life well: freedom, but also uncertainty and darkness. I try to inject a tension that indicates how quickly everything can be over.”

Over the last few years, Gasparotto has had two solo exhibitions, in the Kromus + Zink gallery in Berlin and in the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. Afterwards, to recover from the stress, she headed off to Utah with some girlfriends. Part of Summer Ending, a photography installation she subsequently made for the ING Unseen Talent Award in Amsterdam (where she won the public’s prize) will soon be on display at the Botanique, along with work by ten other promising Walloon and Brussels photographers.

“That installation mixes different techniques: I made prints on old, used, drawing paper and I also show raw, but at the same time melancholy, pictures of everyday life. The end of the summer is a metaphor for the nostalgia that this period brings with it.” The fact that she prefers to show her work in a dynamic mosaic shows that she is in tune with the spirit of the time. “For my pictures, a linear exhibition just isn’t right. They have to explode. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

One logical consequence of the way she works is that the continuity in her work can only be perceived later. “I never look at my photographs straight after coming back from a journey. I need time. I only see the coherence when I dip into my archives much later, and it always takes a while to know whether other people will see it too.”

Souvenirs
Empty cigarette packets from China and Ukraine and cash from just about every continent serve as reminders of many inspirational journeys. “A few beer bottles would have completed the picture,” chuckles Lara Gasparotto, who always makes new friends whenever she travels. Social contacts are an integral part of her artistic know-how. Her bookcase contains books of photographs by young artists whom she hung around with in Kiev and who suddenly found themselves in a war zone. “I want to go back. It does me good to spend time amid committed people of my own generation, even if times are hard for them.” Establishing herself as a friend first, she is well aware, results in stronger photographs later on. The precise location where a photograph is taken doesn’t matter so much, because she’s just looking for a particular mood. For a video for the band Illuminine, however, she deliberately headed off to Spain. “When I listened to their music, I saw red and orange. Down there, I went looking for a landscape to match, one with a polluted, red river and yellow boulders.”

Borough: Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek
Expo: “Voir venir. Angles vifs, dix ans, vingt noms”, > 22/11, wo/me/We > zo/di/Su 12 > 20.00, Botanique, www.botanique.be
Books: Sleepwalk (2012, Yellow Now), Rivages (2014, Lannoo)
Video clip: “Dualisms”, “Llyr” (Illuminine)
Galleries: Stieglitz19 (Antwerp), Kromus + Zink (Berlin)
Info: laragasparotto.tumblr.com

photos: Heleen Rodiers