HUMANESCAPE. Reflection upon man, on the surronding world and reprentations of reality.
Posted By Bomar Studio / 3rd April 2012
Marco Bolognesi, Inland Empire, 2012, 125x196
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” Jorge Luis Borges
The reflection at the centre of the Humanescape project that I’ll present for the 2012 edition of the European photography festival is moved by several questions: How is the individual to be seen within his or her world? How do everyday living, social life, our surroundings , the constructions and constrictions that surround us influence how we feel? How does the individual interact with that which surrounds? Does one feel actor or victim, included or excluded? Being born in a place and living there determines the “landscape” to which one belongs and the reference group to which one compares, this should lend a sense of inclusion, making the individual feel part of a community. This mecchanism, however, isn’t innate in humanity and the collectivity should raise doubts and questions on how to guide the individual towards meeting, exchanging and participating. Society of the new millenium, post-modern, globalised, insecure, has lost its faith and ideologies and, along with these, the structures and limits that characterised these systems over the last few centuries, producing in their place a sense of individualism and solitude. Social structures have come undone, mass media builds a hyper-reality made up of falsehoods and mans’ rapport with others, and with nature, are evermore mediated and artificial. Linking to the concept of Liquid Modernity by Zigmunt Bauman , we may say that the processes of privatisation and deregulation of the State bring to an end the modern project of the individual-citizen. The expectations of the individual and of the citizen contradict one another and may be exemplified in the difference between the ‘de iure’ (rights-duties) individual and the ‘de facto’ (ability to assert) individual. To use Bauman’s words crisis of the individual is characterised by ” a vast and ever-widening divide between the conditions of the ‘de iure’ individual and their chances of becoming ‘de facto’ individuals, meaning to become masters of their own destinies and making choices based on what they truely desire”. The risk is immobility and incapability of asserting the self. The divide was created and is enlarging because of the emptying of the public space: “the individual ‘de iure’ cannot transform into a ‘de facto’ individual before having become a citizen”. My work is moved by this ‘accident waiting to happen’, almost to avoid a possible future, that must be avoided but that is already visible, albeit in embryonic form, around us; photographing and representing a world in which the individual is dehumanised, denuded of all ornamentation and deprived of freedom. Alone and imprisoned, the individual is inserted into a landscape, built of games and scenes that, like the falsities of everyday reality, oppress. Looking back at the characteristics of my past works, operas made up of large format images, with the female figure central, completely painted in white that, like the modern Gulliver, tied down and suffering, recognise nothing within their surroundings and filled with feelings of solitude and motionlessness. As in all of my works, the female body is the actor, this time used as a metaphor of the single individual no longer ( – or not yet) citizen, and the only real element of the image, surrounded by toys. The subtle red line that guides is the contrast between the real and the fictional, white and colour, human and toy. The real is the individual, the womans body, large and central. The risk underlined is loss of humanity: All the details and imperfections typical of humanity are cancelled in these purest white figures, without hair and expressing, at times, seeming resigned to their fate, at others, ready to fight. Here is the apologia of individuals who fight, wrestle and, in the end, give up on trying to defend their own rights, the wish to be an important part of the world. The fiction is the series of landscapes in which these bodies are immersed; like dioramas representing moments in life and real situations. They’re built from coloured meccano, which become landscape structures and, at the same time, coercive elements that imprison the individual. Houses, schools, churches, hotels, gyms, places from everyday life. All around them, many little personalities are playfully busy in their silent lives, unworried by the sufferings and the horror of the individual, they populate the INSCAPE, its internal point of view. The concept of ‘INTERNAL LANDSCAPES’ has been present for some time in my work and this project amounts to its first chapter. The external landscape, objective and tangible, which appears to our senses is always mediated through an interior landscape, hidden and mutable. The interior landscape is the reflection of mans’ gaze upon the world. A subjective vision linked to that which exists, to memories, to emotions, to the people that live in, and shape, the places in which they live. The term ‘INSCAPE’ is used for the first time by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to define that mix of characteristics that confer uniqueness and exclusivity to individual experience. The symbolic message is very clear: No landscape exists without a representation of it and it is through this passage that society manifests its aspirations and participates in the process of socio-cultural evolution. This study of the interior landscape that analyses the links between places, personality and experience has been transformed into this work of INSCAPE and HUMANESCAPE, the human landscape or man running away? A scenario on the limits where the placecomes from a society that is unable to welcome, make feel part of nor grant the individual status as a citizen.
Marco Bolognesi
