Leonello Bertolucci · Jacopo Baboni Schilingi
An exhibition is “the photographer’s concert”, where writing finds its performance, as in music.
Jacopo Baboni Schilingi is a well-known, classically trained Italian musician who has lived in Paris for years, combining classical and electronic music, calligraphy, body art and photography. Invited by major institutions and patrons, he brings concerts and exhibitions around the world. Through photography, his identigraphy restores the nobility of gesture to musical writing and to the sight of scores calligraphed on human skin.
“I want all the emotional, ethical, philosophical, human and sentimental intentions of my artistic being to be legible in my writing. Music as ‘concert’ is no longer enough for me; it has become insufficient. I want to show every intention that made me write a musical passage. And if a concert is insufficient, so is photography.” From Identigraphies, Kappabit.
Let us begin with a brief definition of identigraphy.
“It is a multifaceted writing—body, pose, music and photograph—that identifies my state of mind while writing and in the piece to be played. Music did not allow itself the luxury of immortalising—a photographic word—the writing phase. The composer’s state of mind emerged in performance, while the written score was an instrument, a necessary stage. Through identigraphy, musical writing, rather like one’s signature, regains its identifying value. It creates the conditions for verification: the writing gesture and musical performance must coincide in their state of mind.”
How and when did this connection between musical writing and photography begin?
“We must go back to 7 March 2007. My partner was studying at Bordeaux’s School of Fine Arts and practised body painting among other things. I had dedicated a composition to her, and she suggested writing the score on her body. Writing this piece for her and on her, I immediately realised several things. First, as a calligraphic exercise striving for aesthetic perfection—ink on a body—nothing could be erased, particularly with a final photograph in mind to fix that moment. That spark took a private game into my subsequent Body Score series.
“I also immediately experienced the high degree of synaesthesia this practice enabled: all senses activated around a living body and the aesthetic/ecstatic search simultaneously connected to calligraphic tradition, music and photography. I owe much here to Vincent de Marly, a friend and fashion photographer who recently died and to whom I dedicate this interview. Seeing my first photographs, he noticed technical uncertainties, particularly in lighting, and guided my development.
“I am a musician born in the twentieth century, at the millennium’s end. Photography’s categories are quite closed—people still argue about analogue versus digital almost as an ideological war—whereas music has always shown great openness, curiosity and acceptance towards technological innovations. In the 1980s someone combining expressive forms osmotically was called a multimedia artist; even that word is now obsolete. Music and my body have a profound relationship: I have always experienced music first as bodily vibration rather than through the ears. That is identigraphy’s starting point.”
Your approach has evolved and become more refined. What were the main stages?
“For years I continued privately and primitively; I call it the ‘Neanderthal phase’. I worked with my partner and other models, but my photographic technique was poor, and many elements spoilt the final aesthetic, from lighting to unnecessary or imperfect details. Greater rigour began with a publication in Amadeus, which gave me space and continued following my work over the years.”
To maintain these parallel musical and photographic paths, you write an analogue score on skin, photograph it digitally and return to an analogue result, a paper print. Some photographers similarly use film, scan the negative, then make a print for an exhibition.
“Certainly. But by the 1980s, when I entered music computing, converters already existed. Sound—voice or instrument—was captured with an analogue microphone, converted into a digital file and played back through analogue speakers. Music never experienced such transitions and combinations as unnatural; they were opportunities to try immediately and open new paths. In photography I have seen greater resistance to innovation.”
Tell us more specifically about the photographic process.
“As a musician rather than a professional photographer, I use digital capture because it is easier to manage. But I refuse to produce multiple identical final copies: the body I write on is unique, the calligraphic gesture giving shape to scores on skin is unique and unrepeatable, and every live performance is unique. I sought that uniqueness in the final print. With the help and advice of the excellent Roman printer Damiano Bianca, I found it in combining the old platinum-palladium technique with contemporary carbon printing.
“Very briefly, pigments are brushed onto paper—no two brushstrokes can be identical—combined with the deep blacks carbon permits. Carefully chosen paper also contributes: its pores and imperfections recall an epidermis.”
The word ‘composition’ already links musician and photographer: one composes on a stave, the other in the viewfinder, and your results converge. Another recent convergence, particularly among young digital natives, is renewed interest in analogue processes: vinyl records reappear and create a market, while people seek film cameras and enlargers at flea markets and silver-halide production lines restart.
“I think it is an innate need to reclaim matter’s physicality. Swiping a finger across a smartphone screen did not exist until a few years ago; physically, it is a weak, highly standardised gesture. A camera click is likewise physically weak compared with a dancer’s movement, but a heavier, more complex camera demands a more satisfying relationship between the photographer’s body and gesture: after all, there is no orgasm without effort. The same applies to the partly physical, partly magical ritual of placing an arm and stylus on a record and hearing that warm, wonderfully ‘dirty’ sound.”
Yet one word may mark a divide between music and photography: code. Music has a shared notation: beyond interpretation, a B-flat is a B-flat. Although we speak of photography as a language, no photographic code exists, perhaps fortunately.
“Very true. In early musical writing, code even acquired aesthetic value. Gregorian-chant scores, for instance, were displayed as visual art, decorated with drawings and illuminations that elevated them into unique objects of admiration. My current work is precisely a tribute to musical writing and therefore to code.
“In the twentieth century, the explosion of recordings and broadcasting made music more accessible through loudspeakers than concerts, creating an abstraction that lost sight of work, effort and gesture. My identigraphies, my notes calligraphed on skin, recover that relationship: seeing music rather than only hearing it.”
Is this synaesthetic approach, offering your music to the eyes as well as the ears, more deeply understood by musicians or photographers?
“Definitely photographers. Although sometimes wary, they appreciate the result and understand its process, genesis and intention. Musicians divide into two groups: those welcoming the rupture and those seeing an unacceptable profanation of music’s sacredness. Yet music’s sacredness is precisely what I think of when writing it on a body in an actual ceremony. Every session lasts six to eight hours. I need absolute silence; black cloths remove visual signals and distractions from the studio. These rituals and attitudes are very close to the sacred.”
After all this, what most intimately unites music and photography for you?
“The great attention to detail in the result, in a perfectionist search that grows with one’s awareness. The journey may be raw, rough and uneven, but care is a sacred, unavoidable moment that cannot be delegated in the final result. Care in choosing a particular paper, for instance, had not occurred in music for centuries.”
Biography
A classically trained composer, he has progressively combined images, architecture and performance. He collaborates with Arman, Chevalier, Balpe, Fleischer, Crespin and Sarkis. He is Deputy Artistic Director of Shanghai’s EMW-2015 International Festival, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Guest Professor at Wuhan Conservatory, China. His Argo installation was exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2018. For Chanel, he will produce a photographic exhibition and concert in Tokyo in 2019 [dates as printed]. His long educational path, begun at six, culminated in a musicology doctorate in 2010. He has participated in international festivals in Argentina, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and Japan. Nisic made a documentary about him for Arte in 2000, and Lousteau another for Mezzo in 2007. In 2013 the French minister appointed him Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Image captions: Pierre; Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, photograph by Vincent de Marly; Alia; Clara; Manni; Mehdi; Pedu.