Back in 2014 I started a portrait project that took me five years to complete, a task that I felt was achieved only when I reached a high number of decent pictures – high enough for the idea behind the project to be fully expressed. Yet until 2018, the project was only partial: Giuditta Fullone came into it by drawing her own interpretations of the portraits – adding a further meaning to the images. And on January 25th 2020 we made an exhibition in Milan: Silenzio eloquente.
We found a nice venue called Atelier della Fotografia – managed by Artepassante – through our curator, Vincenzo Argentieri. On the opening evening we were shocked by the number of people that gathered – although most of them were friends and relatives, and a few people that walked in out of curiosity while walking across it. In fact the venue is placed inside an underground walkway connecting two metro stations that are close to each other – therefore hundreds of people pass by it every day. Moreover, the entire venue has glass walls, so all the art pieces could be seen perfectly from outside as well.
Five years to complete a photo-portrait project is quite a lot of time, for usual standards. It took me so long because I mostly worked with friends, and just a few professional models were involved. Every picture required some preparation, to understand how the person could be portrayed properly – in order for the picture to actually tell something about them.
The main idea behind the project come to me out of chance. I took the first picture while testing a recently purchased analog camera for a friend, and after seeing the image on the film strip I noticed an underlying theme that could be further developed.
Framing people with their mouths hidden could symbolically strip the subjects of their voice – an element that is usually latent in the photographic medium. Therefore – out of this unnecessary inhibition of the power of vocal speech – I focused on what a gaze, an attitude and a choice regarding appearances could tell about a person. This deeply reflected the fact that society usually imposes over most of us a role we cannot run from. And this is even more true for women, that can hardly ever express themselves without their opinions being ignored, and just being judged out of prejudices.
I find my images to be much more self-explanatory than how clearly I could convey the purpose of this project by words. And I believe that the photographs themselves would have been extremely less poignant without the help of the drawings that Giuditta made.
«I due ritratti uguali non sono gemelli né riflessi, non sono copie l’uno dell’altro, non sono simmetrici né speculari: sono l’illustrazione il sentimento inespresso della foto, e la fotografia il principio del dialogo del disegno.»
The two portraits are neither twins nor a reflex or a copy of one another, and not symmetrical or specular: the drawing is the unvoiced emotion of the picture, and the picture is the drawing’s conversation opening.
Quote from Vincenzo Argentieri’s Il palindromo imperfetto
I felt so deeply entangled with the project that I chose to also make all the graphic designs involved in the art exhibition: I worked side by side with the other artist and the curator to make a catalog that would reflect both the artists’ intentions and the curator’s work.
The lettering for the exhibition’s title needed to be bold and easily identifiable, and we decided to juxtapose it to a combination of a corresponding set of photograph and drawing. Other than the fact that the couple of images we chose to merge “looked good” this way, the result perfectly summarises the joint effort me and Giuditta made for this project and consequential exhibition.
Such a visual choice was also replicated for the promo cards we placed around Milan to advertise the exhibitions. I am aware that all these elements of graphic design are not even close to being central in an art project, yet I feel that every aspect of such process that can be managed personally by the artists themselves must reflect their intentions.
And we also made a .gif timelapse to explain how to reach the art venue. There is not much to say about it: it just was a fun addition – as we indeed had fun during the whole time we worked on Silenzio eloquente.
Later in April and May 2020 I would have made two more art exhibitions, yet they both were postponed or maybe cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic – both of which would have focused on pictures I took during my trips to Japan, and one of which would have had a live drawing-performance by Giuditta – while the other would have displayed also some doodles I made regarding topics covered in my images. Renderings of both exhibitions are hereby attached.
Regarding Silenzio eloquente – and the project, which’s name for long was just Comunicazione non-verbale (i.e. Unspoken communication), it took me years to fully develop it and finally seeing it displayed in an art venue was the perfect completion for such deeply thought effort on my behalf. Without the people involved in the whole process I would have never been able to make it. Therefore I thank everyone that bore with me sticking to this idea for so long. At least for me, it was worth it – and I hope that the message behind it was indeed conveyed to anyone that saw the images.
Thanks to Giuditta Fullone for reviewing this article.
All the images included in this article were shot on Provia 100F on a Mamiya 6MF (lab-developed and then scanned), on FP-100C on an Intrepid 4×5 or on a Polaroid SLR680. All the photographs included in the project were shot on Ilford HP5 (pushed at ISO@1600) on a Mamiya 6MF, home-developed and then scanned. All the drawings included in the project were hand drawn by Giuditta Fullone, then scanned. The cover drawing is made by me.