Over the period of the past seven years, almost as a form of therapy, I’ve been working on a visual diary, titled Rayuela, self-portraits and portraits go along in an uninterrupted flow with nature and animals, life and death. Being born and raised in the countryside of a small village in northern Italy, those elements were a constant part of my childhood’s playground, which I try to recreate now by designing an imaginary world. It represents the process of growth, the feminine element of nature, the acceptance of the organic decay. I’m obsessed by the vertigo that happens when we perceive the usual order is undermined. A slight laceration in the texture of our visible world. It’s an aged world, with cracks and fissures, dust. There are parts thin as glass-plates, too eerie to walk upon. And finally, there’s the ambiguity of objects: life and death, dream and reality, face and mask blur.
What moves appears stiff, what is still seems possessed by an unsettling life.
Simona Ghizzoni