I Baccanti
2022 - 2023

I Baccanti (Bacchantes) consists of a series of lenticular plates, showing uncanny and ambiguous scenes of a handful of people running frantically, in a landscape of lush vegetation, illuminated by violent flashes of light and almost swallowed up by powerful explosions. All images are close-up stills from videos that circulated on the internet. In such footages, large groups of people, gathered in the occasion of a religious celebration, light and launch very powerful fireworks in a public park, while running fearlessly through the explosions.

The use of the lenticular printing technique makes these sudden changes in brightness – due to the explosions – extremely evident, and allow to reframe these images in a different aesthetic dimension, as they seem to evoke new historical and anthropological meanings. It might seem we are observing churchgoers intent on prayers, a handful of men grappling with a hunting expedition, a group of people immersed in the celebration of archaic and unbridled rituals, in the midst of nature and surrounded by large fires. 

Something sacred emerges from the gestures of these people: time expands, we witness the the archaism of the religious rituals hardly fitting into our contemporary media landscape – suffice to see how these scenes are all recorded on smartphones, which appear in numerous images –, we witness a latent violence being unleashed, and we can find a sense of sacredness altered by passion.