Stefania Galegati Shines: Humans

About

The work Humans is a series of seven videos, fragments of situations in numerous places all over the world linked together in one continuous narrative presented without censure. The videos are an attempt to provide a portrait of man after the advent of the internet and digital media, bringing to light the subjective and ephemeral quality of the visual act of seeing. Having considered the idea that we can be everywhere and nowhere through internet navigation, she draws attention to the intensity of singular moments. She celebrates moments and instances, all similar but each quite different such as people eating sandwiches, friends at an art opening, foreigners in their own land. In this sense, if compared to the ambitious project of Edward Steichen in the exhibition the family of man (1955), a series of portrait photographs taken in over 50 countries from around the world, the work opens a dialog on what we mean now by representation, on the roll of the photographer and on the general relativism of images in our society.  

The videos are a series of quickly changing images that not only narrate the travels of the artist around the globe, but also bring our attention to the small details often overlooked in our own lives. The artist’s goal is to heighten our skills in the analysis of images without passively accepting them. As in other works by the artist, the unexpected or surreal moment is used as the key to reading the real, as though for the first time. The goal is not the abstraction of quotidian life but rather of its reevaluation, an encouragement to observe and engage in daily life with a new sense of sustainability.

With the scope of highlighting the many aspects of Stefania’s work, an instillation was conceived in the SRISA gallery on Via San Gallo that was suitable to occasion. The video divided into seven different chapters will be shown on seven different screens that together produce a series of chaotic cities of Babel to then draw us into her “narration through images”, to give attention to the epiphany, to the intimacy to discover humans and their way of displaying themselves to the world. Paraphrasing Hamlet, you might say that the images are random, but that there is logic in their randomness.