Grand Tour. Saluti da...con bellezza locale

english / italiano

installation | original postcards (posted/unposted) (14.8x10.3cm each postcard) | unique copy | 2018

GREETINGS FROM ... with local beauty is a photographic research about Italian seaside landscape, and its stereotypical representation through a series of postcards of the years 70/80.

The illustrated postcard is the mirror of the habits and customs of the various countries in which it was published, but it is also a reflection of the moral values of an age.
The illustrated postcard, born as an effective and synthetic communication tool, has gone much further.
It transmitted, for some time, important travel memories, the carefree holidays, affectionate greetings and the subliminal messages of captivating advertising images.
This simple and very widespread communication tool, until a few years ago, had to perform essentially two functions.
For those who produced it, the postcard had to represent the most pleasant aspects of a given landscape (urban or "natural"), those considered more communicable, more "exportable" and at the same time more characterizing, that is to say those that distinguish a place and make it immediately recognizable, those for which "it is worthwhile to travel" and visit a place.
For those who bought it, to send it or to keep it as a souvenir of a trip, the postcard represented the testimony of a visit to a particular place and at the same time intended to arouse in those who received it the impression and admiration for something "worthy of to be seen".
The postcard played a leading role in the history of landscape photography.
The fortune of the photo postcard lies not only in the possibility of bringing with it a memory of the journey, but even more, when it is sent, to allow others that representative experience that will then characterize all the geographical documentarism, travel and exploration: "See the image of the world" even without traveling and being able to send this image all over the world.
"The only possible journey seems to be within signs, images: in the destruction of direct experience" Luigi Ghirri
A landscape can be configured differently in the perception of each, also with regard to the figure-background relationship.
The eye passes easily from the figure to the background, the attention is changing, dwelling on one never forgets the other; one exists in function of the other and vice versa and yet, in this complementarity, the value assigned to a single part of the configuration (in this case of the landscape) changes with respect to the whole.
The figure, a naked woman, becomes in this way the center attractor of the look and organizer of the space and in some way censors the landscape itself.
The identity of a place, defined by a party as differentiating quality, on the other as a process that unites some actors (for example the inhabitants of a place), rather than the set of common characteristics, is canceled with a simple copy and paste, of a naked, repeated woman, thus transforming all the places into a single, collective, always the same place. The perception of the landscape, as well as its iconographic representation, which should have a subjective characterization, which is realized not only in the individual attribution of meaning and value to what is perceived but also in the related choices, conscious or not, of structuring figure-background and selection / framing of what lies before our eyes, becomes stereotyped and secondary.
It's the naked woman who becomes the unique image, landscape of that Italy of the Grand Tour where the education, mainly of gentlemen, took place through the journey in which one recognized an almost initiatory function to sex and its practices on foreign soil.