Paola Nasini
Vita
Biography it seems is about where we were the impressions memory, travel, sensations and experiences from family, childhood, school, teenage years and so called "grown up merge into one another like Proust's madeleine".
Rewinding the tea and the madeleine goes something like this. I was born in Milan in 1969.
I studied philosophy reading about the human condition and modes of interpreting the world.
Traveling and living in different countries allowed me to witness a wide cultural diversity and each of those faces was a story, a world that I wanted to know more about.
I came to photography on rainy night in London where i went to a store and bought myself a camera and printer.
That's how I began. And I continue…
Artist Statement
Since I was a child I have been fascinated with people in the street. You know when you stop for a moment and ask “Who is he?” “Who is she?”.
You ask questions to yourself about what they wear, where they are going, what they are doing. So many of them. And you choose one. And follow him or her a bit with your eyes. Examining all the details that make them so unique. And you want to know their essence what makes them who they are. Men and women. Mysteries.
When I started to take photographs the same obsessions arose but then I began to stop those people and ask if I could take a photo and during this time I would ask them questions about themselves.
It’s a way of knowing and finding out about who this person is. The one you stopped in the street. The one you desired to know more about. And I began to see that there was a pattern. Of the ones I chose, many seemed to be a little out of place in this world. Or they did not know their place.
Maybe I identify with this feeling myself.
I’m not a one-take photographer. Literally I will shoot the subject till they tell me to stop or have to get some shopping or take the dog for a walk. I think this because, when you talk and the person gets into a dialogue the mask drops and they reveal themselves for a moment.
And that’s the moment I am trying to capture.
Experience Diagrams
Photos of human faces, yet not psychological portraits. Apparently similar, substantially unique. Actually, it seems that there is something unmentioned, but persistent connecting these images; and the fundamental question, the induced quest for a relation intrigues us, even though we suspect that its individuation is not immediate.
Pieces of complex and troubled vital itineraries, these faces are all but unequivocal. At first sight, they seem icons of marginalization, descriptions of existential defeats... maybe some of them could represent the path of a failure or a strenuous resistance to extinction.
Nevertheless, I think that Paola Nasini's goal is different, that her aspiration is to go beyond these first immediate sensations. As a whole, her photos trace an evolution which is certainly not progressive since her subjects are visibly diversified, while the experiences to which they refer are totally heterogeneous: different geographical sites, different social conditions, many ethnic groups…
One could say that they weave an active web of meanings, ideally defining the non linear graph, the rhizomatic structure of a recognizable universal human identity.
A conjecturable ideal-typical destiny that, and I insist - you must not read this process in a strictly chronological way- goes from a life lived on the margins (the “margin” can be physical or metaphorical), to the conquest of a position (the moment in which individual world becomes strongly affirmative), to the diversity of relations (and here the subject is thrown in the world of interactions with others).
The description of these existential parcels is naturally variegated and dissimilar, and the photos are a clever recording of it: the diligence they boast consists in their intrinsic capability to convey in an instant all the burden of the past, the dramatical intensity of the present, the sustained projection – notwithstanding reality- towards a conflictual future, never at peace or simply gratifying.
And, nevertheless, in most despairing photos, the diachronic tension is never totally cancelled and is essential because it is vital.
In this sense, I think, they are marvellously expressive.
Copy: Antonio Pizza