Parallel Eyes

Parallel Eyes is my personal research about the culture I belong: my aim is to offer a more complex analysis of South Italian culture and to re-consider in visual, historical and sociological terms the construction of the identity of our culture. In between 1950 and 1960 South Italy, the place I am coming from, has been visually studied, classified and judged by a group of anthropologists, filmmakers and photographers. This process started by the famous ethnographer Ernesto De Martino had as result the conviction of our culture as backward, ignorant and completely dominated by the irrationality and religion. This multimedia project includes two main bodies of work: one consists in the manipulation of archive materials produced around the ’50 and ’60 of the past century by the photographers and videomakers belonging the “scientific expeditions” of De Martino. 

At that purpose I intervene the pictures by using photographic techniques like digital and analog manipulation, painting of negatives or perforating them: my aim is to introduce back in the images the magical and ritual aspect erased by the scientific approach of the photographers. On the other side I am documenting though my camera rituals that still exist in South Italy. 

My purpose is not to create a new anthropologic catalogue of celebrations but to build a different visual narrative about our roots in order to change the perception of our past and build a new imaginary of our future. As Byung-Chul Han said: “Rites and ceremonies are genuine human actions capable of making life appear in a festive and magical way, while their disappearance desecrates and profane it, making it mere survival.” The photographic eye explained the world as a discourse, while ritual life is quite the opposite: signifiers without meanings In this on-going project i am looking for a cosmos of symbols, archetypes, emotions that can make feel the inner meaning of South Italian culture.