GUARDIANS OF THE CURTAIN - Alessandro Santi
Trained as an architect, Alessandro Santi (b. 1992, Italy) has always been passionate about photography. In 2017 he decided to suspend his master degree in Restoration Architecture to follow a postgraduate course in Architecture and Interior Photography at Spazio Labò in Bologna. In his project “Guardians of the Curtain”, he explores how our subjective interpretation connects objects, facts and memories.
“We all decide when to open and close the curtain at the beginning and at the end of the performance, but we are partly affected by the result of interpretation, which is built on the experience and knowledge that we apply to the perception of what we are enjoying. We custodians provide symbolic categories, which structure our inner evolution by combining symbols to emotions.”
The project was born out of this need to produce and tell feelings and memories through symbols, linking two concepts: the Archetype and Affordance. The first belongs to analytical psychology, developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, which defines the human tendency to use the same 'a priori form of representation'. It expresses the elementary patterns of behavior and representation derived from collective human experience. The latter, introduced by James Gibson, constitutes an invitation to use and is linked to the idea that the senses are direct perceptual systems that capture the invariant elements of the environment. Using analogue photography in order to slow down the creative process and to make it more thoughtful and sensitive, Santi self-inflicts a deficit, so that the imperfect and immediate impression sharpens the senses and the ethics of the images produced.