SCALENO
On Working in Isolation,
On Working Together
As we gradually move out of lockdown and take our first tentative steps into the new normal – with its wobbly ground and fuzzy boundaries – we have a lot to re-consider, particularly in how we approach our working lives. From discussions with friends and colleagues it’s clear that many of us will try to keep hold of some of the working practices we’ve recently become used to. Businesses, freelancers and the self-employed have realised that working from home is a viable possibility and as a result, those in cities worldwide are asking themselves whether they truly need to be paying city-rent and spending hours each week commuting. Long-distance dialogues have become clearer as we’ve got to grips with video-calling and time-zone differences. Lockdown may very well have led to the opening up of many intercontinental collaborations previously unrealised.
This week we talk to a photographic collective who’ve been embracing remote collaboration since 2015. SCALENO was formed in Florence (Italy) in 2015 by artists Leslie Hickey (from Portland, Oregon), Ana Lía Orézzoli (Lima, Peru) and Hana Sackler (Brooklyn, New York).
Their name is Italian for scalene (a triangle with sides of different lengths). When connected, the cities of each member’s hometown forms a triangle on the map. “These roots are important to us, as are ideas of place, memory, time, and feeling.”
SCALENO offers a vision for collaborations of the future: sustainable working practices that open our creative horizons whilst also having a positive impact on the environment. They’ve put the following text together for us.
SCALENO | Origin map and members
First, a little background: the three of us met at Studio Arts College International (SACI) in Florence in autumn 2014. Ana Lía and Hana were first year MFA in Photography students in a brand new program, and Leslie was their TA. Because the program was so small (there were only three students that year) we spent all of our time together: in class, in the darkroom and on weekend field trips to out of the way places in Italy. At the end of those eight months, one of our professors, Romeo, encouraged us to start a collective so that we could continue to work together no matter where we ended up. He saw how well we collaborated, each with our own strengths, and emphasised how rare that kind of connection was in life. While we founded the collective in 2015, it wasn’t until after Ana Lía and Hana graduated in 2016 that we started focussing seriously on our first project, Some Other Place.
Some Other Place | Newspaper cover and installation view of the corresponding exhibition held at SACI, Florence, Italy, May 2018
From the outset, the idea of place has been a central theme for us, so naturally it became the anchor of our first project. At the time we started photographing, none of us had visited each other’s current cities (Portland, Lima, or Berlin). We began by asking ourselves simple questions: What is a place? What is a city? How do the pieces fit together? We then thought of new questions: What can be found in a park in Lima that wouldn’t be seen in Portland or Berlin? How is fog similar everywhere? Is a place material or experiential? While searching for answers we realised that we were trying to undo distance, using photographs as a point of connection and investigation, across oceans and continents. Over time, we discovered each other’s cities and also deepened the exploration of our own. By bridging our individual everyday moments we created an alternate universe, an entirely new place that exists, like a novel, solely on the page. In thinking about the kind of physical materials one might encounter in a city, we decided to create a Some Other Place newspaper with images from the project as well as texts and quotes that we collected throughout the course of our investigation. In May 2018, we exhibited Some Other Place, with newspapers available for sale, at the Palazzo dei Cartelloni Gallery at SACI in Florence, Italy.
In producing the exhibition, we aimed to deepen the experience of our new cities by creating a sound piece that layered recordings from Lima, Berlin and Portland into one narrative – uniting all three places. Sounds of the U-Bahn in Berlin weave into the buses of Lima and out of a back door in Portland. In Florence, the sound piece was housed in an old landline telephone; in order to hear the recording, a visitor had to pick up the receiver and hold it to their ear, transporting them to what we thought of as a nostalgic present.
SCALENO | Behind the scenes
Our way of working is flexible. We are fluid in our contributions, sharing responsibilities based on our different skill sets. We also work depending on availability: we help to take up the slack when another member is busy. Early on, we decided that when showing our images to the public we would use only our collective name, SCALENO. It’s been an interesting experiment because those who are familiar with each of our individual practices can sometimes tell who made what image and at other times they can’t. We keep whatever project we are working on at the time centred and are always thinking of “what’s best for this work?”– leaving our egos at home. Ana Lía brings a lot of new ideas and approaches with her background in teaching, Hana is our resident sound and video editor, and Leslie is our secretary and writer who is sure to keep everything moving forward.
Overall, it’s not easy to work this way, but we’ve found a way (or ways) to make it work because this collective is really important to each of us. It’s interesting to think about how we decided to form in one environment (where we were constantly together) and the collective has always existed in another, opposite environment. Since the beginning, distance has always been a central part of SCALENO, for better or worse. We have a Whatsapp group chat that is a stream of everything that’s going on in our lives, whether personal or professional. We are in communication daily. We also have regular online meetings, and depending on the work we need to do, those could be once or twice a month.
Images accompanying László Krasznahorkai’s Flash Fiction piece
I Don’t Need Anything from Here
We also use Instagram as a tool. It’s a way to continue our dialogue, to collaborate, and to communicate visually. A recent project on Instagram was an image/text piece, borrowing a Flash Fiction text from László Krasznahorkai entitled I Don’t Need Anything from Here (first published in The New Yorker in 2017). Ana Lía and Hana worked on splitting up the text and then Ana Lía started us off with an image to go with a fragment from the first sentence “I would leave everything here:”. We then slowly worked our way through the text, adding images after we’d proposed them to each other via text message.
Postcards from Carrara + teamwork in Carrara, Italy, May 2018
Another recent project is a set of postcards – Postcards from Carrara. In 2018 we were all together for the exhibition at SACI, and afterwards we took a road-trip to Carrara. Each of the photographs in the set were made that weekend. Together in the same space for the first time in two years we held the hours close those few days, knowing that soon we would be back home, separated again by vast physical distances and far flung time-zones. The postcards functioned as a record of our short time in Carrara and a way to remember what we encountered there.
Since lockdown began, we haven’t done a tonne of work. There’s been pressure in responding to our context. We’ve been reflecting and thinking. While the world has been active, we’ve been quiet. We are still communicating on a daily basis, keeping the ideas going. All three of us are really thoughtful of one another and believe that the most important part of being a collective is not just producing images but exchanging ideas and providing each other support.
We’ve each written a narrative about our time in lockdown, all of us having very different experiences in confinement depending on the cities we live in. Those narratives are below.
Leslie Hickey
Portland, Oregon, USA
Thursday 18th June
Day 88 of lockdown
Images Leslie made during lockdown
One of the last evenings I had in the “old world” of a few months ago was attending my opening at a gallery here in town on March 5th. It was a two-person show called What we See and What we Know with my photographs of interiors paired with Philadelphia artist Erin Murray’s drawings of reconstructed interior spaces. As I worked with the co-directors at HOLDING Contemporary on installation, we nervously joked that the show was in fact about quarantine.
One of my pieces was a diptych of a bed, and another was an image I made of my 93-year-old grandmother’s rotary phone. These were, coincidentally, images of empty spaces, devoid of people. We were hearing the news coming out of Europe, and Italy especially, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before we had our own orders. In the time between March 5th and March 23rd when our governor actually issued the order, I remember a feeling of deep uncertainty, as though there was an ominous invisible force spread over the city. On March 16th, my wife, Eva, furloughed all five of her employees at the bicycle shop where she’s a co-owner. For the next two weekends, I worked at the shop because they were still doing web orders, and people were shopping by appointment only. I remember feeling like I was a part of something (this could be because I’ve worked at home as an artist for the last five years), that we could get through this, together. The people we interacted with were really kind and grateful in those early days, happy that they could get their bike fixed or buy a new one. After 5pm when the store closed, we’d play Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now by Starship Trooper and Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey and have a loud dance party in the middle of the shop. Riding my bike home with her those nights, at 7 or 8pm, the streets looked like it could be 2am – there was no one around. We hardly stopped at stoplights and I remember feeling like it was the Great Recession again – a time that was hard, but a time that had a sense of possibility, of change. I distinctly remember telling myself to enjoy the empty streets because it wouldn’t last forever. March also happened to be an unseasonably dry month here as well, which made for great bicycling.
For my New Year’s resolution, I wanted to write a photograph everyday (describing with words what I see, instead of taking a picture). While I’ve failed at the every day part, I have recorded more than pictures in my little notebook, and it’s become an incomplete record of the lockdown:
March 17
Saw a bald eagle high in a stand of trees on my way to Kelley Point. Dire news getting worse.
March 24 | 11:30pm
Today I took down the calendar and hung the map of Maine in its place. It’s better to look at a map than empty boxes representing time and days.
April 5 | 1:17pm
Sounds of an ancient stringed instrument drifting over the yard. Warm, sunny. Tiny ants with wings on the breeze. Briquettes starting to smoke. The bright, unnatural greens of spring. The sounds of drag racing off in the distance.
As the lockdown continued, it felt like the whole art world was moving online. I attended many Zoom lectures from photographers and curators that I would never have access to in Portland. It felt like the playing field was evening in a way. I took an online class – How to Write About Your Art Practice – which was grounding as the days started to blend together. I joined stayathome.photography and was paired with a photographer living in Cairo. We’ve had a quiet, contemplative conversation that I hope we can continue once the lockdowns lift and shift.
As for my home life, not much has changed. Eva has still gone into the shop everyday, and she was able to bring back all of her employees 4–6 weeks after they were furloughed. We have a huge remodeling project for a house that we bought next door to our own home, so we’ve been meeting virtually with our architect to keep that project going. The backyard of that house was filled with invasive blackberries, and we borrowed an excavator from a guy who is building a small house across the street to clear them all, which we definitely wouldn’t have done if life had continued as planned. A week and a half ago we planted 50 tomatoes in the cleared space, and plan to add 20 pumpkins and squash. We want to donate the vegetables to the local food bank at the end of the summer when everything ripens. I’ve talked to and seen my neighbors so much more than ever before, which has been really lovely.
Ana Lía Orézzoli
Lima, Peru
Friday 19th June
Day 96 of lockdown in Lima
Images Ana Lía made during lockdown
Peru began lockdown in the second week of March, with very strict orders of immobility. People who were not obliged to go to work (such as doctors or journalists), like me were prohibited from leaving our homes unless we went to do our groceries or we needed to go to the pharmacy. In addition, there was a curfew from 6pm on weekdays and, all day, on Sundays. They were early and strict measures that the majority of the population supported, hoping that we can resist the crisis as best as possible. However, the great economic differences that exist in our society, the informality and the precariousness of our health system, have made Peru one of the most affected countries in the region and we still do not know when things will begin to get better.
Little by little, some of these strict measures have been changing and there are already some businesses that do delivery, such as restaurants or clothing stores. In addition, citizens are allowed to go out to do physical activities for restricted timeframes, but we still cannot meet socially. Although, every day there seem to be more and more people on the streets, as if things are slowly returning to normal.
The first days of lockdown were very difficult for me. I didn’t have much to do since classes had been postponed. I was alone at home, because Daniel, my boyfriend, had been stranded in Mexico before the state of emergency measures. I remember being glued to the news all day and not being able to sleep at night due to insomnia. Despite having followed the news of the virus since its beginning in China and its subsequent arrival in Europe, the situation seemed too strange and difficult to assimilate. It really felt like a bad movie. The only thing that gave me a little comfort was to sit outside my front door, after lunch, to drink my afternoon coffee. It was summer, you could still smell the sea breeze and listen to the birds sing, especially the wild parrots that fly through my neighborhood.
When Daniel returned, everything became easier, together we could share the housework and support each other, and to have someone to talk to every morning really makes a difference. With the beginning of the academic year everything became more stressful, although my mind now had to focus on other things than news related to the virus. The amount of training to handle new software and meetings with colleagues in order to adapt the contents of the classes to a virtual system have been really exhausting. Now that we are near the end of the semester, I would say that it has been a successful, but demanding, term. I miss being in the classroom, I miss debating with my students, I miss seeing their faces, because although it sounds paradoxical when you are in a virtual class, even if you are accompanied by 20 students, it feels as if you really are alone.
We still have ten more days of confinement, and during this whole process, I have cried countless times and even these days, every time I have to go out for food and I come across another person to whom I can only see the eyes, it makes me want to cry. I’m thankful for having a job and a roof to sleep under, in a country where around 20% of the population does not have access to drinking water and 70% survive on informal work. This situation has made me question myself about the value of my images in times of a crisis like this. Does what I do matter? What am I doing for other people? I still haven't found the answers, but I really hope that this crisis helps us to be a more empathetic society, to work in community, and for our leaders to focus on what really matters.
Hana Sackler
Berlin, Germany
Friday 12th June
Post-initial lockdown
Images Hana made during lockdown
Berlin began lockdown in the middle of March, but I have been in my home-office since March 6th. When the lockdown started people rushed to get supplies from the supermarkets. First went the toilet paper, then the flour and yeast. Packaged pasta was hard to come by. I had little to no contact with the outside world beside my weekly visits to the grocery store which were made promptly at 7:30am. For 12 weeks I cooked every meal at home and even though many restaurants had takeout services I felt more comfortable and safer making everything myself.
On May 9th shops began to re-open and people from two separate households could meet in public. I still avoided going anywhere or doing anything unless it was necessary. One activity that kept me sane throughout the lockdown was being able to go for bike rides around the empty city on the weekends. I was always too nervous to bike in the centre of Berlin but during this time the streets were empty and there were hardly any cars.
It’s an interesting atmosphere here in Berlin. Even when places were only partially open and social distancing rules were in place, it was evident that not everyone took it seriously. People gathered in groups on the street playing music or waited in line for an ice cream on a hot day without wearing a mask or keeping any distance.
As of May 15th most restaurants, bars, and cafes have opened back up (with social distancing rules in place) and I got my first takeaway coffee. It was wonderful.
With most establishments re-opened and the allowance to meet more than just one other household, things seem to be normalising again. But not the old normal, a new normal. People wear face masks when they walk down the street or buy a pair of shoes in a store. I am very conscious of how close they are to another person at all times. If there is a large group sitting outside a café on the street I cross over to where there is more space. In the U-bahn everyone wears a mask and if you’re not wearing a mask people will look at you like you’re endangering all of our lives. Some Berliners are impatient and anxious for when the techno clubs will open back up, it’s as if their world in Berlin is incomplete without them.
In addition, I, as an Asian person, have to be more vigilant than before because I am seen by some people as the cause of the pandemic. I have been harassed and called “Corona” walking down my own street. Unfortunately this was not the first time I was harassed in Berlin due to racism. I am thankful that in both situations there was a kind and sympathetic stranger close-by who immediately after the incident helped me to feel safe and not alone. Moments like these make me reflect on many things. As the days, weeks and months go on I consume more and more information from the neverending cycle of news, sometimes to the point where I become so emotionally overwhelmed I need to cut myself off.
One of the hardest parts of the pandemic is that I miss my family and friends back home in New York and I have no idea when I will be able to go back and see them. It’s the not knowing that weighs on me the most.
As we enter into Summer who knows what will happen as larger crowds of people begin to gather at lakes, beer gardens, beaches, parks, and outdoor cafés.
All we can do is take one day at a time.
Scalenos found around the world
All images © SCALENO Collective except product shots © Nina Johnson
