Beyond Closed Doors

Description

Oltre le porte chiuse a book by Gianluigi Polizzi Sasso and Dmitri Cebotari.
Preface by Angelo Cerulo, Journalist e Director ANSA Campania
Edited by Francesca Diletta Botte.
Photography and retouches by Gianluigi Polizzi Sasso, Dmitri Cebotari.

Like peering through a keyhole, a camera can tear the thin layer placed on an intimate reality that tries to remain hidden.
The life of a humanity, romantic, sensual, oppressed by illness and – at times – frightening, forced within the walls of its own home, it seems to want to scream its own existence echoing among the now empty streets of a post-flooded Venice still devastated and still in black and white, or as Milan with its soft and dull colors, even if it will cost giving up on its own secrecy.

This photographic project narrates the chronicles of a claustrophobic daily life during lockdown Phase 1 that affected Italy for the following two months and, however, is not just a work focused on the direct effects of the pandemic nor on the way of being inside a radically changed world during that time. Rather, it is a desperate attempt to regain possession of one’s own subjectivity, far from the nagging social judgments to which each individual is necessarily subjected by living in relationship with others.

In the lack of stirring coming from the outside world there is an introspection that develop self awareness, passing from the study of that time-stop-in-time, static, bored, until you get to the study and the re-appropriation of your body, in a place that has become far from the judgment and social conventions dictated by «you will have to» or «you do so». What comes out of it is a new world squeezed within the walls of the home, a non-place where the only way not to let those few people left to be part of our days slip away from us is to leave behind the social absorption of everything we thought we had learned about modern concepts of «privacy» and «impassable boundaries».

Actually, the desire to share found a way to brake the «private sphere». «Intimacy» has became a matter of couple or even a collective one. It was the need to exist next to each other , which now it becomes the only one.