COSTANZA GASTALDI

MONOGYNA COLLECTION

It exists an interaction between photography, territory and geography.

It’s around these three key themes that the work of the Italian artist photographer builds on. Throughout time, she often was brought wondering her journey as a “traveller” and to see with an interested eye the “process of change” that has touched in the course of the last years the notion of same border.

​

Born in Turin in the 90s, a city close to France, she remembers travels with her family that brought her first awareness of what geographical border meant: “Since small, we would go ski in the mountains we had to “pass the checkpoints” at the France-Italy border. We had to take out passports, be courteous and silent towards the policemen and wait for their approval to continue our journey. Every single time, this ritual would impress me. A few years later, my parents explained to me that these infamous borders no longer existed. Henceforth, we could freely move around in Europe. What a relief! What a sense of freedom! At 18 years old, I was leaving Turin to settle in Paris. I was brought to constantly travel and take the plane without showing my identity card, which seemed like something incredibly exciting.

​

Today I still travel a lot in Europe, more often by train. I notice with sadness and a bit of worry a “back to borders”. The speakers on the train constantly reminds us that there has been a reestablishment of border control, that now it is necessary to show our identity cards upon a police officer’s request. The customs check our bags and suitcases, while asking dozens of questions. Are we called into question this freedom of movement of people, that, when younger, excited me so much?

​

In the life of the Italian photographer, there is no borders. The route she takes aboard the TGV France –Italy has a symbolic charge (double check her meaning here) to her eyes: it is the bridge that links two worlds. A city where she grew up and the one she chose to live and work in. This is how in her poetic photography, the journey is found sublimate and the crossing transformed into an assemble of vibrations of space, prints of chromatic breathing and silent resonance.

​

In her images, where the absence of sharp edges suggests a shape of “plasticity of the territory”, the artist gives us the freedom to remodel, via our imagination, what she gives us to see. We can find this “plasticity of territory” in the flux of colours, where the changes continue to subordinate to the mountains capricious light, a mirror of a permanent evolution of our state of mind maybe as “mutable” as the photographed territory.