The young Italian photographer Valentina Marcantelli was born in Florence on 19 June 1993. After studying art at the Policarpo Petrocchi Art Institute in Pistoia, she graduated in March 2017 from Florence’s Free Academy of Fine Arts, specializing in photography. Her main interest is to tell the story of her own worldview, using photography to express her own language. Her atypical and surreal visual structure derives from a deep-seated passion for modern art.
"This photo-essay analyzes aspects of the relationship between men and women within our social environment and how the latter corrupts the former. Worried about picture-perfect public and private lives, one then goes on to forget that it is the couple’s relationship that is important. The work captures three different conditions. In AAProject 1, the dominant models in our private lives distance us from the true meaning of co-existence, of living together. As social animals, we become puppets for whom relationships are always useful for something else, thereby losing the value of the relationship itself. The subjects in AAProject 2 appear in public, but their relationship is hindered by the socially imposed rules. By only showing themselves physically, they are unable to relate to others, creating a self-imposed social screening. In ANIMA ANIMUS, the total discourse takes place with a return to the primordial. Naked, stripped of all preconceptions and imposed models, they find peace a Garden of Eden in a pristine, natural setting. The couple’s union destroys the ephemeral superstructures. Finally free, they remove the "plastic bag", symbolic of suffocating individualism and an obligatory ambition: an Anima Animus finally rebuilt in a single identity thanks to an embrace". From the artist’s introduction to her photographic work in the 2018 exhibition catalog (text from the catalog for the exhibition Anima/Animus/Anime, edited and curated by F. Basetti and P. Cassinelli, Mac,n, 6 October-18 November 2018, Monsummano Terme 2018, n. pag.).
mm 50x70