La Bombola, 2018 - ...
Series of color photographs, 35mm.
Palermo and Napoli, Italy
Here is my intuition : Southern Italy is going to explode.
In Naples and Rome, I had the feeling I was circulating in a big theater, where I wasn’t clearly given the play’s tone - a farce, melodrama, tragicomedy ? Brighella, just like those characters, is able to deal dangerous blows and execute perilous and hazardous ascensions. Sentences, concetti, declarations of love, reproaches, distress or delirium, actresses and actors of mezzogiorno’s dead-ends offer us intense and contradictory information. Frozen by melancholy, they suddenly awaken, and unveil passions and desires. Yet, in the air, there exists an underlying violence, ghostly, which blurs and eclipses the hardness of affects. I have chosen naptime.
The ancestor of all masks could be the devil and he attacks the clergy. Satiric popular entertainment has killed religious representation making way to improvised comedy. Little by little, the devil has lost his horns, his tail, his hair and he has become the common man. It’s Polichinelle, Pulcinella.
La bombola means a gaz bottle and this word follows closely la bambola, the doll. It’s an ambiguity, I would say, the italian way - those two faces, one proud, even cynical, the other credulous and tender, fascinate me as much as they move me and reveale a general behaviour.
works La Bombola
