The Wandering
by Francesca Volpato
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024', 2024
Category: Anthropology and Territories
"The Wandering" is a personal series deeply related to walking as a means of insight and knowing.
The images are part of a larger body of work started in 2020 after resigning, which represented a personal turning point and a source of both indeterminacy and excitement. My visual research took the form of repetitive outdoor roaming, like a process of re-discovering the existing around me. Dating back to 2015, when my youngest daughter was born and the eldest started walking, I used to ramble in the fields with them, careless about time, place and people. Spending time in nature with them with no purpose or plan allowed me to recall the wide-eyed attitude tipical of childhood and the quality of unmediated interaction as a point of connection to the outer world. When they got older, we began setting forth to longer walking in the Euganen Hills, an almost wild and lush area next door where all these images have been taken. This work is a spontaneous and gradual immersion into the arboreal universe in the attempt of abandoning the antropocentric position and getting lost within the wood’s life.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024