Parallel Eyes

“Parallel Eyes” is a multi-media project about South Italian culture to which I belong: my aim is to offer a more complex analysis and to re-consider in a visual, historical and sociological terms the construction of the identity of our culture.

In between 1950 and 1960 South Italy has been visually studied and classified by a group of anthropologists, filmmakers and photographers.

This process had as result the conviction of our culture as backward, ignorant and completely dominated by the irrationality and religion.

This project includes two bodies of work: one consists in the manipulation of archive materials produced by the photographers and video-makers belonging the “scientific expeditions” of the past.

The other is a documentary photographic part about rituals that still exist in South Italy. In the last 3 years I travelled in all southern italian region and island to find those rites of pagan origin that had been absorbed by Christianity and which represented a significant legacy of southern culture, somehow erased by the positivist gaze of the 1950s

My purpose is not to create a new anthropologic catalogue of celebrations but to build a different visual narrative about our roots in order to change the perception of our past and build a new imaginary of our future.

I intervene pictures by using digital and analog manipulation, painting of negatives or pinning images: my aim is to introduce back in the pictures the magical and ritual aspect erased by the scientific approach of the photographers of the past decades.