PERSONAL PROJECTS
THE HISTORY OF...
https://www.thehistoryof.it/
“The History Of...” (2020-ongoing) is a photographic project that includes a large number of historical photographs , through which we want to reason about the communicative power of the medium and it’s intrinsic role within society, of creating collective imaginaries and memories. Historical images enter our memory and with them also the people who were fra- med by the photographer. Frequently these people are not given much importance, and this project wants to make the viewer’s attention dwell precisely on the faces that have been engraved by chance or luck into human history. Making us wonder who they are, what they were doing at the time, and what they will have done with their lives after the photographer’s shutter has closed on their person. It is as if these people have somehow defeated Death and the fear of being forgotten, as in a grand theatrical exhumation their form will remain unchanged and unalterable. Everything that is alive has form but everything that has form must die, everything except these figures who appear embalmed in History, ready to relive as often as our eye rests on their figure, living on forever and never falling into oblivion.
“The History Of...” is a project about History and its temporal power. But in History there is no objective, harmless, primary document. It is the result of the effort of historical societies to impose on the future, willingly or unwillingly, that given image of themselves. “There is no such thing as a truth document. Every document is a lie“. Therefore, according to what Manfredo Tafuri states, nothing we are taught from childhood is completely and invariably True and Real, but is all the result of internal struggles. Photographs themselves have never reported the reality of the World but a new vision of it, even though at the beginning of its conception the objectivity of the medium was one of the fundamental points. The older the photographs turn out to be, the more they are accepted as such and are not subjected to authenticity checks, because it is a common belief that image for- gery is only a recent practice. The need that sustains this project is to make the viewer focus on the faces that were captured in these photographs, faces of people who are most likely dead today, but who unintentionally left a mark of their passage in the world.
The real goal is the inclusion of my persona within each of the reported images, creating Baudrilliardian masks to stage my identity, camouflaging myself in a world governed by artificiality. The images were disseminated on the Web through the creation of an Internet site (https://thehistoryof.it) and subsequently used by Wikipedia pages around the world. Disguised as authentic photographs, they began, out of my control, to circulate among Flickr and Instagram pages, replacing images conventionally considered truthful. Through this project I changed the past, inserting myself within it and remaining in History myself, defeating the fear of Death and of not being remembered, in a utopian immortality.