SUR-REAL
As the global pandemic started I got stuck in the capital of Jordan, Amman. Jordanian government adopted one of the strictest measure in the world to fight against the rise of Corona cases. Consequentially, there were times where we could not leave our house for three of four days in a row. All my personal photography projects stopped as unable to meet people. Yet I still wanted to make something out of isolation, despite only being able to use my house as location and my housemates as subjects.
People increasingly kept calling this period "surreal" and so I decided to read more about Surrealism, the artistic movement originated in the first half of the 20th century in France, and see how it could fit into those weird times.
Surrealism focuses on artists' inner-self, dreams, desires that society usually forbid. As a consequence, paintings often portray scenarios that cannot be found in the everyday life. A similar case then happened as covid-19 and home quarantine
took over the majority of the countries in the world: it forced us to stop and look at our inner self in a background that looked surreal, almost dreamlike. Moreover, Surrealist paintings deconstruct what we consider as "normal" and make us look at society under an unusual perspective. Similarly, the Corona outbreak suddenly showed us the shaky nature of what we used to call "reality" and revealed an unexpected and exceptional social order.
I hence decided to re-enact specific Surrealist ouevres, and/or use recurrent Surrealist elements, and adapt them to our times to make us look at some of the issues that the Corona outbreak faced us with.
Each photo has a specific theme and idea behind but it is intentionally not mentioned as to leave the viewers to a free interpretation. The first photos were shot at my place with my housemates but as the general situation eased up I also started to incorporate different locations and people, both in Jordan and Italy, the country I come from and that after a few months I could finally reach with a repatriation flight.
People increasingly kept calling this period "surreal" and so I decided to read more about Surrealism, the artistic movement originated in the first half of the 20th century in France, and see how it could fit into those weird times.
Surrealism focuses on artists' inner-self, dreams, desires that society usually forbid. As a consequence, paintings often portray scenarios that cannot be found in the everyday life. A similar case then happened as covid-19 and home quarantine
took over the majority of the countries in the world: it forced us to stop and look at our inner self in a background that looked surreal, almost dreamlike. Moreover, Surrealist paintings deconstruct what we consider as "normal" and make us look at society under an unusual perspective. Similarly, the Corona outbreak suddenly showed us the shaky nature of what we used to call "reality" and revealed an unexpected and exceptional social order.
I hence decided to re-enact specific Surrealist ouevres, and/or use recurrent Surrealist elements, and adapt them to our times to make us look at some of the issues that the Corona outbreak faced us with.
Each photo has a specific theme and idea behind but it is intentionally not mentioned as to leave the viewers to a free interpretation. The first photos were shot at my place with my housemates but as the general situation eased up I also started to incorporate different locations and people, both in Jordan and Italy, the country I come from and that after a few months I could finally reach with a repatriation flight.