Dreamlives of Debris: A conversation with A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield

By PALLAVI SURANA  August 29, 2025

GHOSTMACHINE Gallery’s summer exhibition Dreamlives of Debris, guest curated by Pallavi Surana, brings together the work of Anamaya Farthing-Kohl, A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield, and Rohan V. Khanna. The exhibition reimagines debris—rubble, gravel, volcanic rock, dirt—not only as the residue of rupture, but as vessels for memory and speculative meaning-making. Through acts of listening, layering, and reassembly, the artists in the exhibition engage with materials unmoored in time, retethering displaced objects with a renewed sense of place.

Within this constellation, Cincotta-Eichenfield presents Memory / Stone, a series of photopolymer etchings, photographic prints, and sonic outputs that trace the story of a volcanic rock carried home by his grandmother from their ancestral island of Stromboli in Italy. Though he has never been there, the rock became a proxy for belonging and a symbol of temporal suspension between generations. By scanning, digitally rendering, layering images, and probing the rock sonically, Cincotta-Eichenfield fractures its visual identity and reframes it as an object of temporal drift—caught between memory, media, and myth.

Below is an excerpt from a conversation between Cincotta-Eichenfield and Pallavi, that dives deeper into the artist’s work on view.

 Installation shot, Dreamlives of Debris, photo credits: Etienne Frossard

Pallavi Surana  

Tell me about the debris from Stromboli that inspired this series.

A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield  

The fragments of volcanic stone and sand featured in this series were found in my late grandmother’s home and had been arranged on the ledge above her kitchen sink, under a large stained glass image of the Brooklyn Bridge, some of the most legible reminders we had of my great-grandparents’ migration from the island of Stromboli (Italy) in the early 1900s.

Around the time of my grandmother’s death, I realized that what I knew about Stromboli – as a place or “home” – was all constructed through a specific set of stories, told and retold, alongside these pieces of volcanic debris. When I took one of the stones and a handful of sand from that ledge, some of those generational narratives started to break down. Having never been there, those geological objects felt like the only tangible connectors to that place, beyond the body.

Volcanic stones are this very physical record of eruption, inscribed with the memory of the event of their making. To be able to hold the sand and stone more closely, became a conduit for me to start making images. Not necessarily to help me understand the migration experience or to fill gaps in a family image archive, but to point to some of what was missing for me and a feeling of dissonance between a present lived experience and a familial past. The prints and video in the show, then, are informed by family memory but also necessarily imagined, abstracted, and porous. 

Installation shot, Memory / Stone, A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield, photo credits: Etienne Frossard

PS 

There are often three or four degrees of separation from the original object in your work. In the video of the rock, for instance—a 3D scan that you animate—the object becomes quite decontextualized from its place as a marker of diasporic longing. Could you speak more about that process?

A.J.

These objects, for me, do lack context. Obviously, they were in my grandmother's home, which was an archive of family memory, but they are also these floating bits of information that suggest a memory of a past that I can’t quite access. It’s a past that I’m strongly tethered to, but that’s always fading away just beyond the surface of the image, object or narrative.

The video installation in the show, which is a 3D scan of one of the volcanic stones rotating endlessly in time, is made up of individual frames that were transferred from the digital to the darkroom. It became this meticulous act of affirming the stone, continually re-stating its presence at every angle in all of these different forms and frames. But it's also about bringing it back through a series of analog processes that require light and paper and chemistry, places where you might gain or lose image information. When that piece is taped onto VHS, you lose a lot of that visual and material specificity gained along the way, which obscures or erases much of the making process when played back. The stone gets trapped somewhere between these different modes.

PS

I was interested in hearing more about the histories of translation we spoke about both visually in your work, but also, in terms of language as in your grandmother's dialect, and how that changed.

A.J.

Language and translation feel so very threaded through the pieces in the show and the different registers that they inhabit. Stromboli, which is one of the Aeolian islands, had a small population that was relatively separated from other larger areas in the early 20th century, and as a result there was a very defined dialect that was spoken there. This was the language that my great-grandparents spoke at home after moving to Brooklyn and the language they taught my grandmother. The only time my grandmother visited Stromboli, long after her parents died, people were confused as to how and why she spoke like someone many generations older than she was, as the dialect had continued to evolve over the years between. It became this kind of linguistic artifact, of a specific temporal and spatial moment.

Similarly, these volcanic images and migrated artifacts are held in suspension. This opens space for the consideration of geological and familial timescales far beyond the immediate, suggesting possibilities for alternate time structures, mythologies, memories, and fictions.

Installation shot, Memory / Stone, A.J. Cincotta-Eichenfield, photo credits: Etienne Frossard

PS

And how do you see your role as a translator in the work.

A.J.

All of the pieces in this collection of images are a translation of a natural record, albeit often obscured, of some kind of geological event on Stromboli. The stones are formed when lava erupts and rapidly cools, creating pores and indentations unique to that moment. In contrast, the eruption images come from screenshots of webcams of the volcano that I used to watch as a child — which was a very digital way of being aware of the landscape.

So there’s this cognitive dissonance, where, on the one hand, there’s an odd separation from the actual through this digital way of seeing from a distance, where information is passed  through cameras and chains of computer code and relayed over thousands of miles of cable.  But there’s also something magnetic for me about the flow of time as dictated by what unfolds over those streams of video, moving through and between moments of volcanic activity.

At times, I start to see ethereal or figural forms emerging from these obtusely recorded and replicated geological occurrences, which then feel charged with a reference to some real or imagined spiritual context and connection.Those images then also encode something very personal about the act of screenshotting, sitting with this momentary fragment of time or paused reality. There's a secondary process that happens, I think, when a digital image is brought into the darkroom – this odd magic of watching an image appear in the developer even though you’ve seen it before, flickering on a screen. There’s a layer of unpredictability that pulls the images away from the noise of the digital into this newly boundaried form — which in itself removes more information from this experience that is already quite removed.

In the etchings too, I exposed digital negatives onto photopolymer plates, starting with the eruption screenshots, that were then printed to transparency and exposed to UV light, so that the light areas wash out and the dark areas harden. The plate becomes a physical object, where you can feel the texture and indentations of the image – of the eruption or stone, which are then pushed into the page on an etching press using a layer of typewriter transfer paper from my grandparents’ garage. In this way, a mediated digital image of a distant reality is pulled through a local, material past. The uneven marks left by the typewriter carbon transfer add a layer of impermanence and fragility—a slipping away.