Title: Synteborg
Type: digital photo
Technique: digital photo collage
Year: 2007
Synteborg is a photographic project that could be considered the “spiritual heir” to Woodland. However, whereas Woodland combined human, animal, vegetable and synthetic elements taken from tribal decorations to create beautiful posthuman hybrids that eluded any clear notion of time or space, in this case the images were edited and modified with one goal in mind: to give life to a synthetic beauty. Synteborg is in fact the union of “synthetic” and “cyborg”. Synteborg is the search of an utopian beauty.
As the art critic Antonio Canova explained, in ancient times the mythological painter Zeuxis created an ideal woman out of five different classical beauties. The women of Synteborg are Bolognesi’s own bold incarnations of the same ideal, an ideal of perfection through the visual manipulation of the human, but inspired by retro-futuristic sci-fi comics and horror cinema masterpieces such as Dario Argento's Opera. Through the radical use of the digital collage technique, Bolognesi combined elements, faces and bodies from his earlier works. The concept of a purely biological human was therefore transcended by introducing a generative image, something that, like society, is never static and never predictable.