project info
Hot, cold, hot.
Cold, hot, cold...
Small hands immersed in crystalline cavities.
Cold, so cold.
It raises a burning heat.
Tense eyes
to listen to the perception that creeps in.
White images and red sensations
whirl
looking for a place to meet.
And gradually
frames of fire appear.
I dug into the memory of my experience
to rediscover the smell of the film,
the color of the negative.
Faced with the immensity of the glaciers of Argentine Patagonia, where the white and blue of the sky and the mountains merge with each other, where the creaking of cracks resemble an animal that wakes up from hibernation, climate change, evoked by their melting and the heat I perceived, gave rise to the need to photographically translate the phenomenon I was witnessing. Ice is in itself a cold element, but it seems to burn to the touch: shooting directly in negative from my mobile phone (Nokia) the images that came out evoked fire, volcano, hell, while maintaining their beauty in the bewilderment of the chromatic inversion, a feeling of "finished" when compared to an idea of eternity.
It is here in Patagonia, land of the Andes and energy, that my works on the environment, on the elements of nature, are born through their transformation from positive to negative.
The Beginning in particular, made up of 18 images, is a complete, unique work, as it constitutes the beginning of the larger project, Mother & Land, which embraces all projects on the environment by addressing the fundamental elements of nature. The use of digital, even if it is one of the first Nokia phones, was functional to fix what I had imagined. If I think about the history of photography and William Talbot's discovery to reproduce reality (from negative to positive), this "leap back" of over a century brings photography back to its beginnings using and interpreting the negative in its double meaning technical and symbolic. The use of the mobile phone, therefore, is nothing more than the modern testimony of a research, which through digital has allowed me to see instantly that this was the path I was looking for.
Premio Maremma 2012, Galleria "Il Leone"
2009 Premio Photobook HP Indigo, Milano
IPA 2008-2009 Honorable Mention categories Fine Art/Landscape e Nature/Other
press review
Text by Francesca Pietracci
Text by Laura Turco Liveri