Étoiles

“How much does humankind know about itself? According to what experience tells us, very little. Therefor we still have much space for subconscious mind.”
Gustav Jung – ” The archetypes and the collective unconscious “- 1977

I like to think of a piece of art as a creature in a fair through which an artist exposes him/herself in the attempt of communicating thoughts and feelings born from an expressive urge otherwise difficult to deal with, in an ambiguous condition of vulnerability and self-satisfaction. A way of exposing oneself for which it feels worth asking for great sacrifices both to oneself and to others, at the mercy of an occasional voyeuristic public with, as if staring at a freak show, ambivalent feelings swinging between identification and distance.
I chose ballet dancing because among the artistic forms it’s the one that in a more emblematic key is hiding beyond its grace and harmony a strength, an almost violent discipline over body and soul. I chose the masks in order to transform, as usual, my subjects into only apparently objectified archetypes. I chose the double exposure with the wall because to me there is no attempt of human expression that transcends the ferocious battle against death and oblivion.

Family Portraits

“In the same way I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love.”
Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida. Reflections on photography -1980

The Ritratti di famiglia – Family Portraits project is the result of a series of aesthetic choices finalized to a specific symbolic content.
The pictures represent a playful greeting from the people I love the most from a faraway dimension. The people portraits using a double exposure on a single frame realized directly in the moment of the shutter click (and not in post-production/darkroom) all belong to my most intimate sphere - dear friends, close and very close family members such as my daughters, my husband, and my father.
This photographic sequence reflects on the awareness, present also during the happiest moments of my life, that one day all of them will cease to exist. It represents therefore my personal attempt of recognizing time, of dealing with the fear given by this awareness.
These pictures, like a sort of “dress rehearsal”, force me to an imaginary confrontation with the inevitable eventual absence of my beloved ones. The figures, sometimes almost unrecognizable, represent the image that I could have of them in my memories to come. The recollection of my dear ones takes distance from a simple representation and describes the sense of loss and absence, giving back portraits with uncertain profiles and frequently estranged features.
The decision of shooting the double exposure directly on a single frame is not a mere formal choice, but a metaphor of our condition as human beings at the mercy of life’s events. Not being able to fully control the final result of a photo makes every single frame an “individual” with a unique and unpredictable existential path.
Representative of such choice are the so called “dark stripes”, present in all those photos where the two shots were not perfectly congruent. The stripes, by sometimes revealing evocative details, other times appearing as simple geometrical figures inside the picture frame, tell of our vulnerability and the perception of chance driving our existence.

Gaia Adducchio

Polaroid Blooming

“Motionless, stare into space, I was sinking in regions I thought were unreachable…”
Stanisław Lem – Solaris – 1961

The project “Polaroid blooming”, comprehending a body of work of more than 50 images, is born from the necessity to abandon oneself to less codified expressive channels, during the quest for additional creative freedom.
By adopting typical techniques of abstract painting to instant photography (specifically a re-elaboration of grattage skills by scrapping emulsion on polaroid support) and by working with analog and digital means, I intended to realize images that allow, both during the creative process and the act of fruition, to let oneself go to unconscious and potentially liberating automatisms.
From the beginning, from the first application of the emulsion on the surface, until the final details of digital postproduction, references given by the interaction between texture, color and form are shaped in my mind.
Immersive texture, forms and colors which are synonymous of dynamism and at the same time of contemplation and abandonment of senses, in the hope that who is looking at the works can lose him- or herself not in mine, but in his/her unconscious, emotional and cultural references.
Gaia Adducchio