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PRIVATE COLLECTION, 2018
This work is a playful archive, where I act as a collector who borrows images from ancient times and contextualize them into imaginary landscapes and sci-fi scenarios. It is a personal journey between history of art, archaeology and the digital era, where the boundaries between the past and the future become undefined.
The motivation behind the series comes from my desire to ‘actively’ feel engaged when visiting an archive or a museum. In many museums collections, objects are static and inaccessible, literally and figuratively, confined in environments that make them somehow hostile to us. When looking at the artefacts behind a glass, the feeling is that they are imprisoned in the past. The transmission of art historical knowledge in traditional institutions is often entrusted to a rigid organization of objects and hermetic narratives. Because of that, the dissemination of artefacts’ data is for the most part instructional and academic and so the reception of antiques, from the viewers’ perspective, is limited to a contemplative action.
The project function as a personal research where I seek to explore alternative ways of accessing objects from the past, in the form of digitized or ‘modular’ artefacts, for instance. In this way, the relationship between the objects and myself become participative instead of static and the transmission of information more enjoyable. Moreover, in choosing to disseminate the artefacts in a digital or printed form, not only I subvert their original meaning, but I also liberate them and make accessible for everyone.
© 2022 Giovanna Petrocchi. All rights reserved