Reflection: The Global Image and my own practice

I am a person who moved from one country and made another my home. 

Always intrigued by the diversity of the cultures and the difference that the place you live can make in constructing your perception of the world.

In a way, I am still a “stranger”, alien, which makes me more receptive to details that make up the identity. 

Exploring it I wonder how the topography and climate of the place can affect the identity of the individuals belonging to one ethnic group. How does it influence the art, its reception, the cultural features, and the common traits that make up the collective, building up the new ethnos of the settled community in the new location? At the same time, this awareness is far from creating the divisions, quite the opposite. Noticing the cultural differences always highlights the fact that they are, in fact a hidden commonality. It is like a parallel, just in retelling the story from a different perspective (orthogonally).

I chose three photos of mine that illustrate my perspective.

- A winter landscape captured not far off from the place where I grew up, in Central Europe. Where snow completely transforms the landscape, bringing about the quality of the emotional charge and affecting the way people are interacting with their environment.

- The second picture, a tiny quiff at the top of a baby’s head, due to the scale of the detail shown, it represents - with a degree of humour - the tender motherly love and fun at the same time.

- The last one shows my daughter dressed up as Frida Kahlo returning from the festival of Dios de la Muerte in London, in which we participated partly to honour one of our favourite female artists (whose belongings were exhibited in V&A museum at the time), but also to learn how different cultures approach the topic of death and meaning of the afterlife.