Postmodern present, where every traces of the linearity of the Progress seems to be dissolved together with History, has swallow and by this time digest deep transformations of the human thought’s structures, perception of space and time, sense of the world and of the image that individuals elaborate about themselves.
In a world every day more dense and contemporarely fragmented, where communication immediacy removes fisical distances and virtual fluxes dematerialize social trials, in a world where the big meta-telling are missing, submerged by explosion of micro-telling, and hypertrophy of telling and imaginaries go over every possibility of recognition of sense, what happens to the identity of women and men and what about the body?
By her artistic work, Benedetta Alfieri suggest us, by lightness and essentiality of her photographic stroke, that the body dematerialize itself, but without vanishing totally: of it remains in fact the profile drawned in the the space of a dress, the social skin that body lives, the “space between” that divides and at the same time connects the body and the world. The identity of this invisible body fragments itself like a fractal in a pattern repeated infinitely, it decomposes and composes itself again, it moltiplicates itself in an expanse of daisies, evoking nomadic identity by Rosi Braidotti, rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari. As saying that identity, cutted again on a white background, exist only like an idea, like a figuration in an abstract out of time and over the space, in the moment that we build it like tale, come tale and, in the flow of making life, it gives itself as the spread between scattered traces. The identity of this bodiless body, that exists, although its absence, in the dress that lives, sets up itself each time like a movement of aggregation and breakup that the eye exercises between the dress and the form or decorative pattern of the dress itself.
The identity becomes then a game, a puzzle, a movement, a multipling of many identities, interrelated and placed, keep together by a filling of a cloth. And this filling becomes memory, memory of living of the body that the dress “incorporate”. In this memory the dress tells us a story of a descent of women, evoking, through photographic strophes or a poetry by images, bodies and female lives and their material, symbolic, affective relationships that the dress meet in. In research route and artistic working out by Benedetta, the dress becomes then sign of female living that in its tissue traces itself like a coth of relationship of the other, the dress is the tale that by its passage or finding complete itself and it is, over some documentation, a find of personal memories that become memory shared by all women.
Bologna, on February 2006
© Elisa Coco_Comunicattive