ONE OF US
Untitled (One of Us) #1, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, each: inkjet print on photographic paper,
150 x 100cm, ed. of 5 plus 2AP 2015-2017
Untitled (One of Us) #2, inkjet print on photographic paper, 150 x 100cm, ed. of 3 plus 2AP each, 2015
“Everyone calls it the girls’ house” is the name of a shared apartment which I moved into at the beginning of 2014. Today, Sulltane, Barbara, Justine, Alice e Nezka, five young painters between the ages of 25 and 29, still live in this house, in a little street in the center of Venice. This house still acts is a place in which to relive the echoes of a past, the small towns in the Balkans which they left at a young age, and where the girls can give space to their fears, their imaginations and their fantasies. In 2015 I began to create sets in various spaces of the house, sometimes starting with domestic objects, other times taking inspiration from some of their memories, and so I left the scenographies set up for hours or days in the space, just the amount of time necessary to make them take confidence with the new environment and to stimulate a sincere interaction.
In this practice which sees the camera as a means through which to perform, the girls were conscious of their self-representation, and increasingly took part in this “game” inasmuch as I, part of the “tribe,” was behind the objective. I sought to create a group of masks, in which the portrait was enlarged to a more extensive and abstract subject: “the house itself,” or rather an agglomerate of emotive mechanisms, profound and unconscious.
In the photographs of the series the faces are negated, to give space to a single face in which environment and subject mix in a camouflage which manages to transform the photographic document into a symbolic image tending toward painting, in which an abstraction of forms and of colors takes place.The photographs which obtained lye in a boundary zone, somewhere between family portraits, reportage and staged imagery. They attain a hybrid form in which the relationships between individual and space, interior and exterior, objective and subjective, true and false are contradictory. This use of the camera moves out of my ordinary and quotidian experience and addresses underlying relational dynamics which necessitate a stage in which to redefine them and to hence show them in a new form. In 2017 I decided to add to the series the self-published book “Tutti la chiamano la casa delle ragazze” which collects drawings, family photographs and objects scans from the house. This book was made in collaboration with Justine Luce, Alice Modenesi, Barbara Prenka, Sulltane Tusha and Nežka
Zamar. In 2017 the photographs were exhibited in a solo show with objects and artworks from "Tutti la chiamano la Casa delle Ragazze" at Museo Fattori in Livorno, Italy. The show was intended as an attempt to play with the baroque space of the Giovanni Fattori Museum and as a three-dimensional response to the book.
installation view, THE CABINET, curated by Zöe De Luca, Museo Giovanni Fattori, Livorno, 2017
Untitled #2, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, wooden frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 3 + 2AP, 2015
Untitled #8, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 5 + 2AP, 2017
Abbandonate le armi.
Andate oltre gli ultimi ostacoli,
trascinando i vostri piedi sulle foglie,
lasciato tutto quello che non vi è mai
appartenuto. Arrendetevi.
Perché qui non vi sono ostilità
C’è purezza in tutte le sue forme di
brutalità e bruttezza. C’è il lenzuolo
che vostra madre appendeva in giardino
per farlo asciugare. C’è il verde di
ogni primavera che avete vissuto,
nascosto negli angoli buii del
vostro mondo.
poetry found at the entrance of the house,
by Nezka Zamar
Untitled #3, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, wooden frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 5 + 2AP, 2016
Untitled #7, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 5 + 2AP, 2017
Untitled, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, wooden frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 5 + 2AP, 2015
Untitled #5, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 5 + 2AP, 2016
Untitled #6, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 5 + 2AP, 2015
“Everybody calls it the girls’ house” is a new concept of living space, a territory composed by Balcanic elements, painting, first steps into adulthood and lost pasts – a hidden place, a tribe, and a stage. It is a place where everyone can experience a primordial and purer kind of human relations and feelings”
interview on Generazione Critica
Untitled #4, inkjet print on photographic paper, mounted on 5mm pvc, wooden frame (glass),
100h x 150 cm, Ed. 5 + 2AP, 2015
The Cabinet on Vogue Italia
The Cabinet on Wall Street International Magazine
TUTTI LA CHIAMANO LA CASA DELLE RAGAZZE
"Tutti la chiamano la casa delle ragazze", artist book, authors:
Justine Luce, Rachele Maistrello, Alice Modenesi, Barbara Prenka, Sulltane Tusha, Nežka Zamar,
produced by Studio Cortellazzo Wiel & Associati, graphic design by Multiplo Studio
2016, ed. of 200
Some backstage photographs are collected in a private archive,
available upon request.
Sulltane, backstage image, inkjet print,
40cm x 60cm, 2016
Right now, a new generation of girls is living in the “Tutti la chiamano la Casa delle Ragazze” house. Anastasiya sometimes updates her Instagram with some news:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17957372188218953/?hl=en