Older Than Love (from the research for the project Please, don’t ever come down), 2020-2021
Installation (photography, archive material, audiovisual materials)
Recipient of Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, sponsored by MAECI and MiC.
Part of FMAV-Fondazione Modena Arti Visive/Galleria Civica di Modena permanent collection

“Intra-specific aggression is much older (millions of years) than personal friendship and love. There is intra-specific aggression without its opposite, love. But, on the contrary, there is no love without aggression.”
– Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression

Older Than Love is a multimedia installation that takes the personal relationship of the artist with the father as a starting point, developing it through the metaphor of the hawk and its prey, and creating a parallelism between animal and human aggression. The work deals with the theme of aggression and the associated sub-themes, such as fear, anger, and love, emphasizing that in every bond of attachment is inherent an element of aggression. The installation is composed of photography, archive material, video, and sound, in order to make manifest, through the solicitation of all the senses, the aggressiveness and ambivalence of relationships, and their perception. The artwork intends to focus on how seemingly normal behaviors can be interpreted negatively and, on the contrary, how negative behaviors can instead be normalized within relationships, prompting the user to reflect on the nature of aggression – whether an instinct or a learned behavior. Evocative photographs and archive images overlap creating a parallelism between the male figure and the bird of prey, and different levels of reading between past and present. The video repeated in loop presents a montage charged with tension, alternating between the point of view of a bird of prey and that of its prey, until the capture. Finally, the audio is a collage of different recordings of a male voice repeating daily phrases in an aggressive, cold, and detached tone.