The photographic project develops in the fusion of the body with nature and its representation in a positive way.
The subject is photographed naked', in part or in full, where the body relates to the surrounding environment.
The main objective of this project is to subvert the painful stigma that HIV positive people carry, often more painful than the virus itself and the treatment. The basic idea is to highlight the pure beauty that every human body carries and the positive vision it is capable of expressing itself in people who are diagnosed with a disease associated with sexuality and therefore dirtiness.
I tried to subvert the preconceived point of view and allow to break the stigma that in an underlying way people with HIV have been created by the media, photography and cinema over the years and, at the same time, raise awareness about a disease that needs to be accepted as common and not linked to a cluster of people who have sexual behaviors through, controversial lifestyle, but who are part of our society like anyone else. In the meantime, sharing and awareness are important to encourage people to test themselves; Because a person who has a disease and doesn't know it is a danger to himself and others.When scrolling through the images, the viewer is not aware of the seropositivity of the people portrayed, while the dignity, pride and power of these people strongly appear in the photos, in addition to who they are, they do so there in nature.
At the same time, carriers will have a different image of themselves and a self-awareness of their body, feeling encouraged to deal with the HIV-positive condition without the stigma built by society.
Photography allows us to be a vehicle for starting a journey and awakening to the positive condition of the body in its purest state, stripped of clothes or prejudice.
https://www.publico.pt/2022/12/01/p3/fotogaleria/homenagem-corpos-lindos-saudaveis-pessoas-seropositivas-409324
Getting to know each other through self-knowledge is a good couple’s exercise. So it happens that a single photographic session suddenly becomes common, the experience of a dance of bodies arises in a natural and spontaneous way, in which everyone does her part, although there was no script.
In the 1948 autobiographical novel, Confessions of a mask, Yukio Mishima describes his first masturbation, which occurred following the strong attraction towards a painting, found in a book by his father: Guido Reni’s San Sebastiano. The martyr’s body, young and attractive, has been identified over time as a queer icon, a stumbling block against the demonization and criminalization of the enjoyment of the body.
It is the hero who chooses with his own body to give his life for his own principles and who decides, without calculation, to pay the price for having dared to be himself.
I found in her an overwhelming femininity, that of a voluptuous and delicate body, which turns out to be exciting even when she doesn’t want it; that same femininity that seemed to block her breath like two hands around her neck. I have seen a fragile and vulnerable femininity, surrendered to emotions but without any desire to be horrified by the monsters of the past. Those same monsters that entered her life, taking her breath away and which, with immense effort, chased her out, recovering what she was: a powerful woman in a powerful body.
« There is always a reason why we allow a person to enter our life.There is always a reason why we allow a person to manipulate us, depersonalize us.
There is always a reason why we allow a person to overcome the common limits of physical and psychological violence. Our body speaks for us, transforms itself, transfigured by suffering, by pain, even before we become aware of it. The body has memory, just rethinking a strong emotion and here it transforms again, pain and suffering reappear. Through these photos I relive and defeat that pain and suffering. The prison of memories. The memory and trauma of my tight, strangled neck.
In ancient Greece the female body, considered as the bearer of darkness and impurity, was placed in opposition to the male body, worthy of respect as with the meaning of a “political body”.
Women were therefore relegated to a hidden part of the house, exclusively reserved for them and the children. The number of women who shared the days inside it was considered as a body itself, called gynecea.
I’ve imagined this sequence of shoots inside an apartment as a representation a modern gynaeceum of women that talk to each other and to themselves during a long day spent together. The memories, the absences, the fears and the expectations of each merge in unison in the nudity of a single body, a gynecea , to which it is difficult to assign an identity, if not the same unique one deriving from their communion and fusion.
A journey into pandemic emotions. Fears, desires, presences and absences are at the center of this six-handed study, born from reflections and improvisation in a Lisbon interior.
The subject of this collective research is the impact of the pandemic on affects and the body. Body and affects are seen here as concepts and emotions deeply affected by the social and planetary transformations generated by the long-lasting and deadly acceleration of something called neoliberal capitalism, of which the ongoing pandemic is only one of the latest outcomes, together with the uncertainties and further vulnerabilities generated by the omen of a recurrent viral catastrophe.
The voice that accompanies the present photographic story is situated, individual, and collective at the same time: it represents a viewpoint, an emotional tangle that reflects the lonely experience of one of us who is also and immediately in relationship with the others, and in the absence of the Other. This point of view is provided here in a circular time lapse, as the pandemic overflows the boundaries between past, present, and future, it brings memory in the realm of dreams and filters emotions through fears of the End and loneliness.
What lies beyond the eyes: a night swallows the next, in weeks that last a day, in hours that last months. Spit what I can’t keep within, in soft swirls. Stay inside, drown there. I imprinted the shapes of your body on a veil so that I can touch them when nobody sees me. Suspended in memory while still alive, you are a Shroud on screen, AD 2020.Heat passes through surfaces. Our curtain will be thin, so that every spark becomes a warm halo with your features. And so that you can caress me before your arms grow cold.Will it be elastic enough, resistant enough, aseptic enough, safe enough? At most, it’ll guide us through crossings we’ve been unaware of.Let’s get back into the Russian doll: in the beginning there was the plastic-wrapped candy, then came the blowjob with a condom, then, finally, we decided that skin itself was just too dangerous. How many layers are left between the inside and the outside?No place is harder to reach than here, now. In fact, we haven’t even set foot there yet.Thigh or chest? We are under the sheath like skin underneath a layer of hot wax: if you tear it off properly, it only hurts for a second. We will do it slowly, one millimetre at a time, in the most inefficient and painful way.They bring us to the table. Together. They will eat us wrapped, without even chopping us up. Not that it matters, since we’re not here.We are all alone, see?
Ida Fiele 