PENNABILLI
2018 - ongoingThe virtual world invades our visual and inner sphere on an everyday basis. It does so through the emoticons we use on chats, the fantasy aesthetics of television series, the post-apocalyptic scenarios of videogames and the digital interfaces that constantly intermingle with our physical space. Computers and smartphones become extensions of our private and mental worlds, and of our own potential, creating a collision between real and virtual that is even stronger and apparently divergent in rural contexts. The project has been created in Pennabilli, a small town of about 2000 inhabitants in Valmarecchia, in the Tuscan-Romagna Apennines, which like most of the inland areas in Italy is characterised by the contrast between the potential offered by the landscape and culture, and the gradual decline and ageing of the population due to a lack of opportunities, services, and safeguards for the land. Constructing her images together with the inhabitants,
Rachele Maistrello brings into being a new atlas of the present, in which the digital and rural worlds interact in a dimension that is fanciful and utopian, yet also deeply rooted in reality.
Rachele Maistrello brings into being a new atlas of the present, in which the digital and rural worlds interact in a dimension that is fanciful and utopian, yet also deeply rooted in reality.
c-prints, 30cm x 40cm, ed. of 3 plus 2AP each, sculpures, variable sizes
Susanna con mantello dorato
“The separation between fantasy and reality”, says Gianni Celati on the subject of fantasy in the English-speaking world, “is based on the gap between the subjective and objective world. And this separation emphasises the fact that fantasies ‘are not true’ because they remain outside of ‘scientific truths’. We need to start from here, bringing into question the idea of this clear separation between the imagined or fantasised world and the one that is officially said to be our real, everyday world.”
