The experience of each individual evolves based on the tangible and emotional events that act on the perception one has of the external world; this determines a change in one's internal dimension.
The center of experience, the heart, the fulcrum, the control room is that "place" – in there – which moves evanescences much more solid than the flesh that forms the body.
The room is the sum of emotions, sensations, moods, to add to the invisible if not with gestures, choices, vita.
The challenge, visually speaking, it's giving something back Invisible, impalpable, muto. The languages chosen are different: static or moving images, but customs are always essential to respect the grammar of the raw material.
The evanescence of the blur helps to capture the imperceptibility of the subject's interiority, the static nature of other images instead highlights the achievement of fixed points, securities, certainties in exploration.
The setting is a room of a place abandoned or incomplete, two well-defined categories, even if they are neighbors, which suggest stimuli to the portrayed subject. These environments also allow a hint of a parallelism between person and environment, between man and territory.
The subjects involved, by answering a questionnaire preparatory to the creation of the photographs, begin to open up and during the exploration of the place they discover new corners of their room.
ENG
The experience of each individual evolves according to the tangible and emotional events that act on the perception that everyone has of the external world; this causes a change in one’s inner dimension.
The center of experience, the heart, the fulcrum, the control chamber is that “place” – inside there – that moves far more solid evanescences of the flesh that forms the body.
The room is the sum of emotions, sensations, moods, addenda which are not visible if not by gestures, choices, life.
The challenge, visually speaking, is to give back something invisible, impalpable, dumb. The chosen languages are different: static images or moves, but always essential costumes to respect the grammar of the raw material.
The evanescence of the motion blurs helps to grasp the imperceptibility of the internality of the subject, while the static nature of other images highlights the achievement of fixed points, certainties in exploration.
Instructions
The photos are also visible in full screen.
By clicking on the i the curtain with captions opens at the bottom left.
The emotions were almost all written entirely by the performers.
The room and covid
We live in strange days of an era, hopefully short, which will leave indelible traces in each of us. If over time we forget them it will be due to that natural human propensity to put the most dramatic experiences aside in a corner; but today this is not the case. Today, being forced to remodulate the ritual of everyday life, we bear the signs in our living flesh of the upheaval of our habits. “Nothing will be as before”, expression with which every profound threat is greeted, it is already here starting from the change of the daily liturgy in light of an event of which many of us had no experience or memory.
Photography has widely explored the theme of the relationship between humans and their surroundings, using the latter – in its various declinations – as a powerful metaphor. The reverberation of experiences, of ailments and inconveniences is analyzed through the watermark of a reciprocal relationship. This dynamic, happily expressed by a literature that, thanks to the imaginative power of the words that make up a story, he was able to describe man's discomfort and inscribe it into a general theme. Literature releases the power of the imagination, photography does not. The photography, due to its ambiguous nature, where in everything its opposite appears, it is not depicting to establish a feeling, but he can create it. On the contrary, must create it.
If photography wants to move away from being "the art of the visible", to explore the territory of the invisible, he must create an apparatus of "signs" around himself, a visual grammar aimed at its decipherment in which to read the depth of the message; “signs” that are enriched with the speed with which contemporaneity is thickened with new events, often disastrous, such as that relating to the spread of the Covid-19 infection. With an almost prophetic anticipation, the photographer Andrea Scarfò, he explored with the Room and Covid, the effects of the physical distancing to which we are called following the provisions that see us in quarantine.
However, the more physical distancing distances us from interacting with others, suspending the natural activity of human relationships, it has so much power to force us to weave a revealing relationship with ourselves in the light, as they said, of a remodulation of daily activities. In this sense Andrea Scarfò has made a choice, offering us a personal point of view on a story whose repercussions act on the psyche. The ruins, be they of a house abandoned to the neglect of time, or those of a now abandoned activity are the scenario - one might say the metaphor - of the expressiveness of discomfort, of a malaise that demands to be seen as well as heard. In the photographs of “The room and Covid”, which we hail as an exercise in upheaval, we see the alignment of different elements, the explication of signs that chase each other to define the same objective. The subject, first of all. Let it be still, as if just struck by the chilling hardness of an emerging awareness, or agitated by a “motto” which underlines its restlessness, it is always at the center of the image, as if to establish visual supremacy over the rest.
Yet the "rest", he does not resign himself to a secondary role. In the compositional balance of the "signs", the background in which the subject expresses himself has been assigned the function of detonator of a malaise in search of resolution. The hostility of the environments, the inhospitality of the areas is the material counterpart of the upheavals of the soul. In this brutal and unstoppable "dialogue" we see the emergence of a composition that opens the way to suggestions to which we can entrust a name, because one of the most important functions of photography is to force us to think. And it is reflected by observing the work of Andrea Scarfò. It reflects, for example, on how the photographic action is called to tell these terrible days and translate them through an authorial data that does not decline its meaning towards an aesthetic drift. In the Room and Covid the tension runs through the images with a constant force, disruptive, left free to extend to cover the entire composition. There is something purely primordial, close to the root of the discomfort, and which must be understood in its entirety if we who watch also want to understand the multiplicity of nuances with which an illness presents itself.
And that's exactly why, for the wealth of contained references that we associate not with speed but with a dynamism similar to torment to the swirling of human arms, a technical trick that only makes sense if well resolved. Then a change of pace, almost as if to suggest a momentary stillness, photographs warn us of the porosity of the human soul, of sensitivity towards the different nuances of a wounded soul. The ectoplasmatic figure, so harshly exposed to a foreign and unknown wind, they stop in search of temporary relief, almost as if to catch his breath before the restart, before a capitulation. As, those hands stretched out towards a gap from which the light spreads warn us of the existence of a hope; labile, Perhaps, but alive.
The Room and Covid and this, the news of a current event that has never disappeared; can be enriched with new elements, generate new fears, create new alarms but it is above all a story about the need to establish a new relationship of reciprocity with ourselves, an intimate coexistence that can establish a new ecology of relationships. Not an easy task. Andrea Scarfò, with the curiosity that befits those who want to understand the things of life, he recounted the explosion, the moment of maximum crisis. Establish motives and reasons, leading us to the genesis of an adversity is not the job of a photographer, he is only a witness who always arrives at things that have happened.
Giuseppe Cicozzetti
9/04/2020