Personal Belongings
"Somewhere our belonging particles. Believe in us. If we could only find them " WS Graham
"A kind of nausea or intellectual vertigo produced by the inhuman acceleration of historical change that has characterized modernity. It is the very impossibility of satisfying our need for belonging – a need manifest in the constant search for the unfamiliar, whether in ourselves or the other ” Susan Sontag, The Anthropology as Hero, 1963
Maria Di Stefano is interested in the idea of identity and belonging to a group or place. To her, photography is a method of research. Participating in reality rather than simply capturing it is important for her work and her ethics.
There are no journalistic scandal, no big gesture. Instead she aims to tell a story that is more intimate and private in the home space that revolves around the daily routine.
She has focused her attention on autochthonous communities and how modernization is impacting their lifestyle. After working and living with the Kali’na Indians of the Amazon, the Sami peoples of the Arctic regions of Northern Europe, the Zapotecos of Oaxaca in Mexico, and the Koguis in Colombia, she decided to come home, “If we could only find it” .
PB is a project that merges images from the family archive with photographs taken worldwide over a seven-year period (2015-2023). It starts with the notions of mother and home and analyzes them in a literal, metaphorical, and mythological manner.
The archival photos depict her mother as the main protagonist, since childhood she was upset by the camera, hiding, and scared. She has been able to cut herself or others out of the photos, literally. What remains are suggestive absences, rather than presences, the reproduction of forgotten elements, and residual images.
The work serves as a metaphor for a void and the need to fill it, wandering around remote areas searching for our 'belonging particles'.
Human figure is out of focus, not perceived as coherent unit but rather as pieces of identities that are not fixed.
The family archive is associated with its opposite: drifting away and rejecting the land, the values given, the established order, and the birthplace.
The intimate space is confused with the theatrical scene as the casual with the staged. We are witnesses of the story and not of fact that it is occurring, the events are faded but but the memory of an image is more powerful than the image itself. What is offered to the spectators is an anti Cartier Bresson spontaneity, an invitation-intrusion in a parallel, barely alive and grotesque universe.
