Title: Humanescape
Type: photo installation created for European Photography 2012
Technique: mixed media (models, body painting, head cap)
Year: 2012
Humanescape certainly marked an important step in my way of making art. Previously the focus of my analysis had been on the modification of the individual, cosmetic surgery - with Cyborg Faces - and GMOs - with Woodland - in this project I chose to focus my attention on the world and the landscape surrounding human beings. Its genesis dates back to the sketches and drawings that I started to produce long before, back in 2008, when I was trying to rework the conceptual and formal vision of photography, which usually involves the division into Landscape and Portrait.
The project comprises twelve landscapes. These are landscapes that present elements of the contemporary world around us, that society is forced, willingly or not, to face and with which it has to deal: refuse, toxic waste, civil protest and hardship caused by unemployment, lack of freedom and loneliness, the spectacle of violence and the debate on what is socially acceptable. The human figure, which we recognize within them, almost as part of the landscape, is present but distorted, painted white, without any specific connotations and imprisoned by this landscape, bound, immobilised and powerless. The woman is an ever-present element in my work and in this case assumed the role of a simulacrum of the contemporary person, completely immersed in a representation of reality that is fake. The only natural element within the compositions, her being naked, white and hairless, stripped of her ethnic-social origin transformed her into a symbol and gave the viewer the possibility to develop a feeling of identification.
It is a work through which I propose my own poetic interpretation of reality but that at times is also chilling. The playful element, its chromatic and compositional pleasantness, is crossed by a deep restlessness that makes it almost a superfluous, but at the same time indispensable, ornament: the game is the way to learn the world but also the way to narrate it.