Galerie SIT DOWN 4, rue Sainte-Anastase 75003 Paris France
Mois de la photo 2010 Point information 5,7 rue de Fourcy 75004 Paris France
“The first and last frontier is the one that separates us from each other. It is the moment when thought overflows the perimeter of the individual and begins to embrace the world: my breathing, my way of seeing.
The Latin word cum-finis (the origin of the word “confines”) is an oxymoron for shared limits and evokes two concepts that are both similar and contradictory. As I thought about the theme of this work focusing on Italy’s northern borders, I had the idea of depicting the mountains, a crown of wind-torn ice that separates the regions that stretch out below.
In the idea of a frontier, there is a horizontal dimension that can be crossed at a glance, and I took this as my starting point: finding how to climb high enough to get a view similar to that of a geographical map, showing the extent of a territory which, taken as a whole, goes beyond any sense of belonging. Once up there, under the vault of the sky, I felt I wanted to explore the vertical dimension of the frontier. I wanted to go down into the silence of the glaciers, touch the harsh concretions of the rocks, hear the roar of the mountain streams deep in the ravines and the echo of my footsteps in steep-sided gorges rich with the aroma of damp moss. From this earthly standpoint I could look up at the distant sky, once again far away up there, hidden among the branches and leaves, high above the ancient pines.
Although this work follows the morphological lines of a natural frontier, and although its backdrop is the great theatre of history, its intention is not to achieve a historico - geographical reconstruction. These are glimpses of a territory which, though located on the borders of Italy, is also, in my way of seeing things, a land situated somewhere between my imagination and my memory. It is a unique private landscape that belongs to all of us.
The destiny of a single person or the history of several, it’s the landscape that, for each of us, corresponds to a single point in the world”.
Giorgia Fiorio