THE POSITION OF THE SUBJECT
By Jorge Alberto Perez
In Roberto Vietri’s ongoing project, Trabalho, there is a distinctive visual vocabulary in action that is easy to recognize but vague in its message – and I like that. It is not just that individual images are “open-ended” – the project itself is porous. He photographs marks and traces just as fastidiously as places and spaces with the potential to be marked, to have a trace put upon them. Some images are only straight-forwardly documented where in others he has ‘intervened’ with an action to alter the position of the subject – and consequently, how we will see it. In other cases he is the agent of the mark on the surface of the photographic print itself. It becomes difficult to know which is which except with time and very careful looking – which might be precisely the point. Vietri wants us to know and not know what we are seeing, to question what is true and which is, well, less true. He wants to make us aware of the act of looking and how we make meaning – especially when that moment occurs when the image shifts from document to arena for a mark. Like a seamless conversation, each functions as a springboard to the next, and back to a previous one.
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