NORDEST GRAFFITI

Nordest Graffiti is the last chapter of an ongoing long-term project with which I am investigating those spaces left empty inside the lattice of the 'Spread Cities'.

Through years of research, I have been observing and highlighting how strongly the form of urban space affects social dynamics and vice-versa. It is from this awareness that "Nordest Graffiti" is born; from the need to express the existing parallelism between the virtual (Internet, Social Forum) and the reality (urban landscape and society) by using the key of the cinematographic language, both in the aesthetic and conceptual senses. 

The body of the work is composed of panoramic images (16:9 and 5:2), imagined as waste material from a hypothetical film montage.

Taking some time to reflect on yourself will soon be considered a luxury. If we could do it, we would realise how different our lives are from its representation. The era of social forums is swallowing lives and spewing endless film montages made of highlights of some small ordinary moments painted as a principal scene. Everything included in the empty spaces between one selfie and another becomes nothing. Like a network where only connections and intersections count, everything else is wasted, forgotten, and abandoned so that we are giving ourselves the illusion of living a life as if it were a movie, an uninterrupted flow of famous scenes and selected moments without any waste of time or space, an artificial and selective memory aimed at tampering with existence to follow the new aesthetic rules of social sharing. This representation of the contemporary is peculiar to the shape of the modern ‘Spread Cities’, a sprawling kind of city where villages and rural areas around the main centres become urbanised, often with low-density housing. 

North-East Graffiti is a photographic research project that seeks to explore those almost empty spaces like cut scenes which appear as not worthy of being shared, far from the main flow and antipodes concerning the human concentration of big cities, and far from the main places of mass meetings or the massive infrastructures and ways of communication. Nordest Graffiti propose a collection of production scraps from a movie that everyone would like to see and discards pieces of a hypothetical catchy film made to be loved but just a surrogate of our need for acceptance.

Looking at a photograph of a beautiful landscape or, if you prefer, a beautiful picture of a beautiful landscape, I suddenly stop to think: <What if this photograph looks pleasant just because it shows the image of a beautiful thing?> If looking at this beautiful landscape, besides noticing a few technical expedients on the part of the photographer, do I become aware that what it represents is all right there? In what does it show?

So in front of that photo, I imagine the author as a photographer hunter-gatherer, a humble reproducer of what is there, a taxidermist of the ready-made, so I keep asking myself:<if we photograph a beautiful sunset, do we have a nice picture of a sunset? >. Probably, and then <if we photograph an imposing mountain, do we have a photograph that expresses sumptuousness?> Yes, [I think] it is one of the most predictable results.

Wanting to see it like this, the author or the authors will appear (if they appear) as an irrelevant detail, a small rowing boat in the middle of the waves of an ocean of beautiful images.

Perhaps it was also due to the desire of photographers to get back to the centre of the question, to redraw the attention to the act of photographing, that in recent decades, it has turned into a great habit of immortalising bad things to get some attractive photos such as photos of garbage, reportage of degradation, exposure of dark corners that would not deserve attention. At this point, often without interruption and in the flow of images that falls on me, I ask myself questions about that beautiful landscape, finding myself stiff in front of a flashed photo of a spit on a brick wall. That initial thought that questioning the sense of reproducing beauty (as we commonly understand it) becomes the idea that, with the noble purpose of strengthening the relationship between author and work, photography is sinking into the sea of ​​obsessive reproduction of ugly stuff that we would rather keep very far from ourselves; a sort of new aesthetics of the exotic or, as I like to define it, the allegory of rejection.

Hence I tried to walk in forgotten areas, in places marked as degraded or, at best, in an exploitative process, to frame, select and transform the shit into art (or at least in a good photograph). Yet no matter how hard I tried, not one of my attempts captured the original scent, metaphorically speaking, as I was still looking at pictures of shit (shit as an object, but also as a subject).

However, failing to go further and finding myself at a standstill on the matter, which I leave deliberately open, I will limit myself to see it like this:<if we put as postuòate that a photograph of a beautiful thing has a good chance of being a nice picture (I’m not saying intriguing or original), simply because of what it shows, then we can say that if the photo is horrendous, most of the demerit should fall on the subject and not on the author.

In short, you can also say that these pictures are disgusting, but at the same time can you assert with equal confidence that it is all only my fault? But if not, could you take your responsibilities as observers this time?