Italian visual artist Davide Pepe was dealing with grief when he became fascinated with representing the spacetime continuum. Finding comfort in art, he spent years developing a software and a shooting technique that would allow him to document the world from a perspective where everything happens simultaneously, and what began as a lifeline evolved into a pioneering form of experimentation. He walks writer Gilda Bruno through his unique process, and his hope that others can find in his works the people or places they can no longer see.
On a rainy day in 1995, cycling through Bologna, Davide Pepe was captivated by how the wall to his left flowed beside him, blurry and ever-evolving. It was then that he realized photography, as a technique, wasn’t enough for him as a visual storyteller. “What I needed was film,” he tells me. Polaroid cameras were the first to work their magic on him, but nothing proved more game-changing for his style than that bike-powered awakening.
Pepe’s fascination with portraying the spacetime continuum (the mathematical model that fuses length, width and height with the concept of time, to help us understand how we perceive various events) had begun four years earlier, in 1991, after he’d suffered a major bereavement. “This sense of things vanishing without notice became a leitmotif in my art,” Pepe says. Soon, an idea began to creep into his mind: “If only we could live seeing our entire existence happening all at the same time,” he thought. “Then we would still be able to see people who are no longer here as well as those who will be there in the future.” According to quantum physics, everything happens simultaneously. The pieces Pepe has crafted take this notion to the extreme by “rewriting and tracing the passage of light over time.” Unique in their kind, these installations manifest the constant flux that surrounds our lives.
To create them, Pepe, an Information Science graduate, dedicated nearly 10 years to perfecting a C# software that would allow him to condense minutes, hours or days of shooting into the same image. His “People” and “Cities” series, for example, depict human and architectural subjects by randomly juxtaposing fragments from thousands of frames captured over a time window in one “changing” portrait of them. “In these artworks’ stills, there are a huge number of vertical lines, each one belonging to a single moment,” Pepe explains. If observed up close, these images resemble glitches, but “when we look at them from a distance, the full picture—composed of bright, daylight segments and dark, nighttime ones—emerges.”
In “Access Denied,” the artist’s “inner cinema” reveals itself as slowly surfacing, mutating objects such as moka pots, bottles and toys. The ordinariness of these items is turned on its head by the emblematic stories they carry and Pepe’s suspense-based approach to conveying them: a bowl of cherry tomatoes evokes the slow-paced ritualism of the meals he shared with his Apulian grandmother, while the warping signals that we are nearing “the event horizon—the outer edge of a black hole—where everything deforms,” he explains.
Pepe’s real breakthrough came with “Se potessi vedere con gli occhi di Dio” (If You Could See With God’s Eyes). In each frame of these videos, the entire shooting interval—ranging from 24 to over 48 hours—is displayed at the same time, the first line on the left standing for the moment the camera starts filming, the last one on the right, the moment it is switched off. In this series, the viewer experiences reality “through the space of the shooting, as if it was observed from a timeless dimension,” Pepe says.
“Imagine you are sitting on a chair, traveling through time,” Pepe says. “In front of you is always the same view, yet every second leads to a slightly different vision of it: maybe a person passed by or a window lit up, and their outlines are now impressed on what you saw before. At every instant, your chair gets pulled back slightly, while all variations of the original scene become superimposed before you.” In the individual episodes from this collection, lensed in different cities across the world, you are no longer looking at a landscape from your standpoint, but “crossing it” longitudinally. “It is as if each frame of these films was the page of a book, but instead of staring at the pages of the volume, you are traversing it through its spine,” the artist adds.
Pepe’s spatio-temporal scanning photography technique visualizes the flow of time through swathes of light and darkness that transform the center of the shot into an abstract composition. That detail alone sums up his work: “in his ‘Confessions,’ philosopher Saint Augustine talks about how, in the eyes of God, reality appears formless and timeless,” Pepe says. Similarly, in refraining from showing things as we perceive them, the artist leaves the door open for others to find meaning in his pieces and resonate with what, in everyday life, they can no longer see.