Urbanautica

STEFANO PARRINI. ELEMENTARY HIEROPHANIES AND DECODING OF THE GAZE

by Steve Bisson

«A space of creation, embryonic, of the world, in which the original elements, fire, earth, water stand out. Here the altar, the cave, the top of a mountain, the cosmic tree, and all that repertoire that the human-animal has produced as mediation with the "Heaven" take shape in a tragic and never interrupted ascension attempt.»

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No code'

Stefano Parrini has been pursuing for some years an artistic journey aimed at decoding the gaze. His images function as mirrors in which, rather than finding pieces of reality, we reveal ways or possibilities of understanding it. Photography, as a thinking-device capable of unhinging a passive view, of unleashing mental short circuits, of opening breaches on unexpected horizons.

His latest research originates from the recomposition of an archive of images in which photographs capture while traveling alternate with past pilgrimages in the deserts, with old slides once used in school teaching, with traces of gestures and space interventions. What is the thread that binds these fragments? I would say an aura of mystery that places the observer on a symbolic level. An initial alienation due to the almost extraterrestrial landscape soon gives way to a powerful suggestion: primitive mountains and rocks, totemic bodies, shots of reflected light that bring out a distant past. A naked reality, where the distance between the human-animal and nature almost disappears, and a relationship expressed in an essential language emerges.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No code'

The megaliths are a primordial artifice, which indeed documents a different relationship with the cosmos. Yet, at the same time, they determine the very existence of homo, which is recognizable today precisely through these handmade means. Therefore that of humans is a history of tools. As the camera captures the illusion of time, the handling of stones has functions and purposes that history, especially that of religions, has already outlined.
Despite their diversity, they recall the symbolic complex of the "Center," wherein ancient rituals took place, where myths, sacred practices, transcendental knowledge took shape. Today the mystical center, then place, and later religious temple par excellence has been replaced by a somewhat more "commodified" one, which perhaps misunderstands the meaning of archaic images. However, this secularization process does not deny a quest for belonging to a familiar microcosm in opposition to the uncertain chaos of darkness, to the terror of time that finds justification in death's consciousness, or rather of an end—therefore of a boundary of life, a finish, and a possible transition.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No code'

Thus the "Center" is a space of creation, embryonic, of the world, in which the original elements, fire, earth, water stand out. Here the altar, the cave, the top of a mountain, the cosmic tree, and all that repertoire that the human-animal has produced as mediation with the "Heaven" take shape in a tragic and never interrupted ascension attempt.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No code'

That of Parrini's transpires as an act of concentration, an attempt to initiate the gaze, starting from elementary hierophanies that can eventually free an inner universe. An Imaginarium that is, before all, a desire to escape from a profane vision from a superficial historical condition. Without calling upon the theory of archetypes, which later made Jung's fortune and part of psychoanalysis, I like to think that this experiment resembles the story of a myth, or a "spiritual creation," in short, a narration that re-actualizes "a time out of time," and opens up to a redeeming dimension, and projects beyond the suffering of the present.