Angelo Vignali on Photography, Memory, and Ritual

In an interview for ATP Diary's New Photography series, Sara Benaglia and Mauro Zanchi speak with Italian artist Angelo Vignali about his practice spanning photography, sculpture, and installation. Vignali discusses his book "Flattened in Time and Space" (2020, published by Witty Books) as a film on paper that collapses linear time through montage, creating a liminal zone between Tarkovsky's Stalker and Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. He describes images as unstable entities that gain meaning through circulation, and his work "How to Raise a Hand" (2022) as a collection of 313 finger photographs that function as a device of attention rather than an archive. Vignali's wax casts explore the gap between copy and matrix, where imperfection reveals the impossibility of absolute replication. His ongoing series "Rituale" (2026) uses performative repetition and failure as an anti-ritual that confronts loss without consolation. Objects belonging to his father are transformed through ritual action, oscillating between relic and banal matter. Vignali sees photography not as preservation but as a device that reactivates time, producing a spiral where past and present collapse. The interview covers his 2019 exhibition at MAR – Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, his 2022 show at Mucho Mas!, and his 2025 exhibition "Il Corpo Latente" at Amanda Space.