Babel

Babel is a visual meditation on the use of photography through two of the most relevant examples in today’s capitalistic society: billboard advertising (as seen in the Paris underground) and Daesh propaganda imagery (as seen in Dabiq). The project aims at combining two contrasting and apparently antithetic messages. It attempts a portrayal of the war which is being fought – by unprecedented means, on unprecedented fields – between a Western civilisation, which is losing its identity, and an alleged Caliphate, which proposes a whole array of radical moral values, by distorting one of the world’s most widespread religions. Are we neutral spectators or oblivious hostages? Babel was born from this question. From the impression that we are all like coloured pieces of chalk, writing a story that we are not conscious of. Powerless individuals caught up in a larger event despite ourselves, unmindful witnesses living through an epochal change. Babel began in 2014 with a study that was initially intended as a homage to the Italian artist Mimmo Rotella. The background of the canvas is thus set. The different images and layers of meaning captured by our eyes every day, sometimes subliminally, have been stratifying on this canvas little by little. Babel is a listening place for the notes resonating in our subconscious, for the sudden changes in our inner rhythms, where images remain fluid both in shape and content. The outcome is a digital manipulation, a meta-photography which gives birth to a hypothetical world living within the frame of the format that we have chosen. The dissection of confetti-like messages, which are ironically and provocatively compared. A blending of the estrangement on which the master communicators base their campaigns.

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