What do we see when we close our eyes? What are the images we carry with us? In the projects by Alisa Martynova, Francesco Merlini and Iacopo Pasqui, photography recalls, through juxtaposition and editing, the complex network of relationships, perceptions and feelings through which the world is imagined and seen.
Alisa Martynova
NOWHERE NEAR
The migrant’s journey is a long one, night after night, inching toward the horizon like constellations. Not just typical stars, they are high-velocity stars, ejected at supersonic speed by black holes and scattered across the cosmos by the force of their propulsion. And these strewn stars, in their crossing, are like the migrants that I met in Italy and who had come from Nigeria, The Gambia and Ivory Coast: across Europe, seeking El Dorado. In the choral testament of the voices I collected, the celestial constellation is one of young Africans from different countries, of different genders and with different traits, a testament to the individuality and diversity that each of them embodies.
Francesco Merlini
SURIMI
Painters have always held the privilege of being able to recreate the images of dreams. However, photography can also be used to represent the dream world. In fact, the gap between reality and representation, as it appears through the photographic medium, creates a short-circuit similar to the one we experience when we dream. In the same way as in dreams, in photographs reality seems inaccurate, visually deformed, but a repository of deeper emotions. Individual fragments of reality, photographed and decontextualized, thus become collective archetypes of an imaginative world, enhanced glimpses built with pieces of reality to show a universe that we can only dream of but cannot photograph.
Iacopo Pasqui
RACCONTO D’ESTATE
A Summer’s Tale is a simple, fragmented story: a light and distinct memory like some dreams are. Inspired by Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, it persists the time of a caress. This is a dream with open eyes, full of escape and enthusiasm for a few long-desired moments of vacation. The frames are witnesses to my dreams and, once again, photography helped me understand that sometimes our expectations lead us to great heights, often unattainable, while dreams can be simple and achievable, as if there was no need to go too far to turn what is untouchable into something palpable.
