The Exhibition

The photographs on display, like all those she has always taken, have a common denominator: the autobiographical form. They are autobiographical not in the most literal sense of the term, because ultimately in this selection there is no home, nor her, nor her family nor friends (who nevertheless frequently recur in the boxes of her archive). There is a unity of place (from Ravenna to Punta Marina, the places she lives in) and time (they were all taken between 2021 and 2024), but above all there is the same gaze, the same way of seeing. Defining it is perhaps impossible, but it is easy to recognize. It has to do with a certain distance from the subjects (is there a relationship between depth of field and depth of feelings?), with a predilection for suspended scenes and people who are equally so. In what sense? In the sense that, if you look closely, things and people seem to be between sleep and wakefulness, poised between complete immanence and elsewhere, unconsciously and delicately lost in thought. Perhaps this is why her attention often falls on adolescents, because every adolescent is an ambiguity on two legs (she is what she is, what she dreams of being, what she believes she is and what she will become), on flowers (transformation, ephemeral beauty, coded language), on old people in elegant, out-of-fashion clothes (who seem to live in their glorious past), on leafed-through posters (time), on the outskirts, on the writings on the walls (messages in bottles and cryptic captions of what is happening on the street). Another characteristic element is that the subjects often look into the camera, and the curious aspect is that even the objects or images found do so, or rather, seem to do so. If you pay attention, you will notice that it is all full of eyes, real, reproduced, metaphorical, hidden, (are they really there or is it an illusion, a suspicion, her and ours, due to a curious ancestral warning system?) and they are looking right at us.