Extimate
This series of photographs and sets explore the idea of the strange and the anodyne, both terms closely related to the concept of melancholy, which I first approached when beginning this project. The intent is to construct landscapes and atmospheres that recall a sense of estrangement and alienation. The sets are built in my studio with photographs I take at the American Museum of Natural History, which I then print, cut, crease and fold in an aim to create my own natural universe: sticks, stones and rocks, mountains and hills, ground and soil, fantastic creatures and implausible life forms. It is the combination and disposition of these elements into that new universe that brings me to another important aspect of my work: my personal interest towards the world of theatre and drama. Here, I combine the concept of melancholy and the idea of the (indeterminable and sublime) landscape with my own wish and desire to involve exercises on set and theatrical design in my artistic practice. The theatre and stages of my sets are filled with bizarre animals and natural elements, made out of photographs of dead and stuffed animals that were once alive, creating the perfect scenario to enact and evoke the image of enigmatic lunar landscapes, connecting and exploring the ideas of morbidity and the uncanny. This [illusionistic] spaces are beautiful, sometimes quiet and still, but in the presence of that dried and dead nature a morbid and unsettling presence is perceived. There is, therefore, a tension between death and life, nature and artifice, beauty and morbidity. All this is, in brief, an exercise on my own experience of death and my love for the stage.
