Sissa Micheli

Clothes are flung into the frame, the camera recording their brief flight. Then the shutter clicks, a selected moment is frozen and stored; the garment, meanwhile, has long hit the ground. Piece after piece sails through the room and hardens; each sequence ends in a freeze frame, culminating, as it were, at the “critical moment” when the malleable fabrics are cast in a definite form. Moving bodies cross the still pictorial spaces, which act as receptacles* for the missiles before they reach the endpoints of their trajectories.
And offscreen voice accompanies the flight of the blouses and skirts in London’s former garment district, reflecting on the On the Process of Shaping an Idea into Form through Mental Modelling: the relation between photog – raphy and film, the instant as distinct from duration, and the act of realization between calculation and “unknown knowns” (Slavoj Žižek). For however definite the contours of the textile sculptures in the photographs may be, many factors including acceleration, air drag, gravity, and so on influenced their shape. The process, Sissa Micheli argues, is akin to the materialization of artistic ideas: “I have a mental model but I do not know what the final picture will look like,” the offscreen voice says. The play on the boundary between photography and film inevitably hints at a rivalry between the two media; it is hard not to think that every photograph ultimately arises from a “film,” and like James Williamson’s 1901 short “The Big Swallow,” the work blithely plays off one medium against the other.