Description
They Return to Their Earth
In the project They Return To Their Earth, photography moves by revelations. The intention is simple: to suggest, through the image, the equation that the human body, here female, is nothing more and nothing less than a manifestation, an emergence, of natural discourse. Achieving this is complex. Language does not help. The verbs unveil, reveal, discover presuppose the presence of a veil. The intention here is to reach an earlier dimension, in which the body is first and foremost an organism and appears as such. Naked but not stripped, if anything, bare. The subjects are not undressed: theirs is a body before dressing, and before what dressing brings with it. (Dressing as protection, from external conditions and the gaze. And as a form of projection, through which to give an image of one’s own). With her series of photographs, They Return To Their Earth then seeks to establish a relationship, to bring together female body and nature through juxtapositions, pairings, interpenetrations. The images recompose human and environment in as many correspondences: a leaf dries, the body wrinkles; a flower freezes, the body freezes; the plant adapts to the pot that contains it, the body draws its own space in the natural landscape. Are we the same thing? Temperature, position, surfaces: the human is in its elemental state, the vegetation finds itself posed. They Return To Their Earth is an aesthetic research, made of movement and stasis, on the meaning of nudity. It is an attempt at a neutral, objective depiction, almost compiling an atlas of new botanical forms. The series questions a representation free from a sexualizing gaze, and thus calls into the background the themes of censorship, sexuality, eroticism, but also the sacred, mystery. The whole project is a journey of interaction with the subject and observation, testing whether it is possible to see beyond social constructs. The answer is suspended. Is there such a thing as a nude without culture? To escape judgment, the body can only merge with nature, lose its attributes. A photograph that is revelation becomes a photograph of a disappearance-who remembers that apocalypse, the word for the final moment, means nothing but revelation?
