I will go out and look at the flowers, 2020 -
Project Statement:
The words of Rupi Kaur poem have been the spark that led me to create the diptychs composing the series I will go out and look at the flowers. It's as if these verses gave voice to a difficult moment I was going through: it was the end of the longest romantic relationship I've ever had, followed by constant love failures. I felt exposed, in a condition of constant fragility. My reaction then, as now, is the acceptance of my fleeting fragility, necessary to prepare the ground for a new blossoming, a different self, as Kaur writes. I learned to see the beauty and strength of my constant falls and rebirths. . In fact, I had to see that behind all those continuous falls and continuous rises, there was a great strength and beauty.
The title of the series is inspired by a poem by Edith Matilda Thomas where she speaks of a girl who in front of a broken heart says: 'I'm going out to look at the flowers' to remind herself of the beauty inherent in situations of pain and emotional fragility.
My works on self-portraits comes from personal experiences, also in this project I explore the feeling of emotional delicacy that I experienced, through the visual form of photography. Inspired by a classical tradition of visual research that connects the human body and flowers, I have built a symbiotic parallelism between the female body, as the main vehicle of experience and the formation of my emotions, and flowers. The latter, due to their annual flowering cycle, represent both the image of life and death. In fact, they are metaphorically considered both a symbol of transience and of harmony and beauty.
In the diptychs, my body, through the poses, movement and the flowering garments, on one hand it reflects the shape and color of the flowers, while on the other it becomes expression of its inner state. Assuming postures that are harmonic, delicate, but also intense, the body seeks beauty whilst exploring its condition of sensibility, femininity and intimacy.
At the basis of this work there is the importance of the performative and theatrical experience, which also finds space in the care for the choice of clothes, stage costumes that accentuate the visual effectiveness of the parallelism. The self-portrait here becomes a powerful means to investigate my relationship with myself, with my body and my imagination. The visual result underlines an ambiguity that binds each pair of images, when it is no longer clear whether it is the body or the flower that imitates the other.