IL TEMPO DELLA FESTA.
'Il frammento ha in sé una invincibile necessità, il germe di qualcosa, qualcosa che vale più di un significato, la spinta ossessiva a essere completato, la perentoria eloquenza dell'incompiuto"
Paul Valery.
I took these photographs between 2003 and 2007. At the time, I had no idea what my future choices would be, including becoming a photographer. These shots have an immature quality, yet for me they possess the dignity of a point of reference. They describe a way of inhabiting time and space. Their nature is the nature of fragments. It was a time when we were still adolescents, perturbed by the shock of the end of the millennium, and we discovered ourselves to be nomads, adventures, pirates. Our lifestyle was centered around “psychic nomadism,” a mosaic of arrivals, departures, opium harvesting, festivals that culminated in cosmogonic rave parties. There we came together and from there we would depart.
Once there, you would encounter the experiences you had to tackled along a bizarre path of elevation and transgression: losing oneself, finding oneself, navigating different states of consciousness and spontaneous rituals. Yet any explanation is superfluous, you can’t explain a Rave, all you can do is participate.
The nature of the fragment is to exceed the dimension of personal archaeology, dipping into an unspecified generative power. For this reason, I hope my images aren’t merely the archaic diary of my years of vertigo but also a window opened onto the future, tickling the imagination as to the inexhaustible human need for the creation of independent areas of resistance and experimentation, hacking both time and space, the boundaries between primeval collective entities and futuristic, joyful apocalypses having faded.
PERSONAL ARCHAEOLOGIES.
These fragments bear inside them the first instinct to photograph something massive with the intent of rendering it harmless, of neutralizing the feeling of wonder and amazement that overcame me at every step. Everything was enormous, oversized: the space, the sound system, the dimension of our freedom, the infinite “egotism of adolescence.” (1)These are fragments of a pilgrimage between different architectures, traversing lines, crossing boundaries, cutting across rooms, scaling smokestacks. And then all of a sudden it happened: the boundless perspectives intersected and produced an encounter, space stopped dilating because you had met that gaze: maybe it was a new nomadic love. Loudspeakers, sweat, mosquitos, travel vocabulary and archetypal pseudo-gutter punk theatrics. “Games, magic, and anarchy,” (2) as someone said much more fittingly several years ago now.
From the poem "Twenty years old" by Arthur Rimbaud.
From a book by Matteo Guernaccia Gioco, magia, anarchia, Amsterdam negli anni '60 (Games, Magic, Anarchy, Amsterdam in the 1960s)
NAMELESS YEARS.
These began with the greatest art installation ever televised: the 9/11 attacks. Then they passed almost unnoticed in the Western world, turned into “incognito” years because they had no name. Their number is 0, like the Fool in the tarot deck. Is it possible that the nameless years (2000-2010) – with their events, their temporary autonomous zones, their “psychic nomadism” – were one of the last intervals of freedom offered to Western people? A combination of variables rendered this possible: an urbanism that hadn’t yet been gentrified presented tears in the urban fabric that could be penetrated and offered a place where you could come together and throb, a satisfying technological development still shielded from the totalitarian aims of the capitalism of surveillance, an authentic psychedelia supported by the practice of traveling and events. These were spaces where new models of existence were contaminated by actions, encounters and the creation of a common dialect found in the theater of the street, where genders were in fact exchanged without satisfying the old and new hegemonic theories. Who were the young people of the nameless years? They were the children of the party of the century, of the 1980s, of the mass culture of television and Japanese cartoons; they absorbed the esthetics of the glossiest and most costly videoclips in the history of music production, and all of a sudden, they took everything apart, deflagrating in street life and in an underground culture traversed by a great and powerful shudder: the idea of the end of a millennium.
I dedicate these photographs to all the people who accompanied me in the collective work of art of those years. These shots are for those who continue to erect wonderful transitory utopias. Rave parties are not a crime.