This is a short essay about the Italian photographer Sara Magni that I wrote some time ago for the catalogue of “Fuori 5”, an exhibition at Galleria Gallerati, Rome:
“Waking up from a nightmare of desolation, discovering to be frightening and completely alone.
Founding themselves in a cruel and frozen night, in a pasolinian lawn. When the concrete buildings are the background, you suddenly realize that your room’s walls are just a fleeting shelter. Is it all just in our own mind, or is it actually a torched dream?
The series “Doppio Incubo” (Double Nightmare) was realized for the Premio Cairo at the Permanente in Milan. In this work the author explores the theme of man’s estrangement in the city. Sara Magni ventures in the human psyche, taking snapshots directly from the subconscious. She enacts characters that seems out of context, but at the same time she forced us to deal with them. No one has the voice to cry his longing for an “elsewhere”, we can read in his photos a frozen shadow of reality. Her research is displaced in the suburbs and non-places loaded with a reflection or anxiety, a sort of alienation in between Antonioni and David Lynch.
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