GIRONEVE is a photography project focused on the theme of identity made up of a series of portraits snapped in long exposure times in multiple flashes. It’s a project which was born from the desire to recover the consciousness of self through time by physiognomy and individual expressiveness.
Present age is the victim of a globalization process leading to flattening the folklore and all the changes in society which affecting the perception of the individual. More or less consciously, everyone tends to homologate itself inside, repudiating his weakness and discontinuity. From the moment a person is born, it seems that her/his identity is ensured only by a name: along with physical characteristics, it makes everyone recognizable in the eyes of the people around, as a reminder for all of them. Usually it is the first word everyones learns to write, the first sign of own identity, despite in the past (but -although whispering- now as well) it has always been replaced by a code depriving of the right live their single lifes.
The aim of this project is to give a voice to this identity through a symbolic thread of memory. A photo-document that becomes an identication card of three almost simultaneous moments: as in a cubist painting, it generates a new form of the individual himself, a sort of “trisfrons” Janus (front view, left and right profile) aspiring to greedily gather as much information as possible of the shooted individual.
This “re-customize” process becomes an experience that each model lives before, during and after the photo session:
-Starting from the moment when, through a white paint put on her/his face, in order to skim some redundant information (so other details can get up),
-Passing through the time of the real photo session, when we relate each other (in fact, the identity is built through relations with other people),
-Ending with the camera display screen showing the final image (at this point the model is really excited to recognize her/himself).
In this way, identity seems to be something beyond the self control and leading to the more general concept of the precariousness of existence and impossibility of summing up every moment of life if not through a through-tracks identity. Combining these “islands of conscience”, the “plural” personality seemes to become UNIQUE and only: each one is like the “one, none and a hundred thousand” recognizable human trace.
The decision to call this project “GIRONEVE” derives from the acronym used by Italian cardiologists to remember where the lead electrodes of ECG are placed on limbs starting from the left arm: “GI” for “giallo” that means “yellow”, “RO” for “rosso” that means “red”, “NE” for “nero” that means “black, “VE” for “verde” that means “green”. The heartbeat seems to be the soundtrack as well as the fulcrum of this container of multiple but unique human identities.
