Stalker
by Roberta Capaldi

Istituto superiore per le industrie artistiche, Urbino, Italy
Graduation year: 2019

portfolio shortlisted call 'BLURRING THE LINES 2019', 2020

Stalker is a sequence of 58 photographs in color, dedicated to the homonymous sci-fi movie by Andreij Tarkovskij. The images are made in the experience of the unresolved voids spaces, placed at the edges of the cities, in other words those fruitless space’s fragments called by Gilles Clément Third Landscape. Roadsides, riverbanks and the areas underneath the bridges have been chosen for this research. These places, derived by subtraction from the organized space, are highly variable spaces, capable of a self-organization from the chaos. Therefore, they can be considered as a refuge for diversity not only biological, but also cultural and political. The attempt has been the one to walk through these unknown reservoir of diversity, giving to these objects and refuse of men’s cultural and economic action on landscape the dignity of the gaze. Moving as the stalker, that with his walk takes possession of 'The Zone', the forbidden place of the movie that shows multiple contact points, cultural and aesthetics, with the anthropized space’s peripheries.

Stalker is an invitation to think and act photography as a practice of desire, subversion, and persistence. To walk through interstitial residual spaces, in urban’s landscape voids usually located at the edges of the cities, as an attempt to find something, through photography, in the place where nothing by definition should be. To turn the gaze to the minimal, to the banal, to the rejects, preparing yourself as the stalker to listen and to see. In this way there is the chance of random and unexpected encounters, that is to say, the small apertures of the real, in which things reveal themselves as the bearer of a different meaning. To be able to think a practice of photography as a form of resistance to modernity that destroys landscape and men.



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