X/Y PROJECT has been designed and produced by the artists Maura Manfredi and Luca Rossini.
If Maura were the mother of the project, then Luca were its eternal lover.
X/Y The X/Y PROJECT isn’t really easy to define, maybe because its very definition is left somehow open to the interpretation of each of its participants. The original idea’s seed was to give a chance to anybody to be part of a work of art and, to do so, to make the latter modular and repeatable. An infinitely long dinner table has been chosen for this purpose, and we decided to have it photographed from two perspectives, one frontal and one from above. The two perspectives introduce other dissimilarities, spatial and temporal, not only in the furniture and in the subject’s costume, but also in the frontal image depicting the “beginning” of the dinner, and the one from above showing the “end” of it.
The scenario brings along as many dichotomous concepts, such as order-chaos, good-evil, life-death, apparent-hidden, truth-lie, as religious symbolisms, like the last supper, the human and the godly perspective, and the free will.
So, what’s the X/Y PROJECT? It’s a visual research, from a symbolic and iconographic viewing point, of the innerly dichotomous nature of the human being, constantly hanging the balance in the precarious equilibrium between order and chaos, good and evil, life and death. And it is an open and collaborative research, meaning that each participant brings his or her own interpretation of this concept, meditating on his or her dichotomies as if they were the “soul’s cartesian axes” and from there picturing how his/her life and body would look like at the most dramatic extremes of such axes.
This means that every shot comes with a true and personal story, deeply human in its very nature. These stories will be collected, together with the shots, in this blog for as long as there will be participants willing to share their view on the concept and to be pictured in it, becoming part of an open, collaborative, and potentially extremely alive work of art. You’re all invited, of course!
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