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This Was Us by Andrea Ciulu #21

Collection

This Was Us by Andrea Ciulu

Description

ARTWORK DESCRIPTION This post-photographic black and white collection adopts the form and the rigor of an archaeological catalogue to look at us - or what’s left of us - from the future, putting us in the role of a distant observer. The objectivity of the photographic language is used to detach us from what we take for granted. The collection is composed of two types of pieces: the sites and the artifacts found at those sites. While very formally different, these two groups are bound by a unified narrative: the whole collection is a single work. SHORT ARTIST STATEMENT I am darkly fascinated by the idea of societal collapse. Today it’s clearly everyone’s underlying fear (Will it be climate change that ends us? Will it be an AI overlord?), it really feels like we are running out of gas and yet we are too terrified to even mention it as if it was unthinkable. But societies and entire civilizations have collapsed before. All the time, actually. Working with the Anahuacalli Museum this takes a more specific meaning: you look at the Aztec, Mayan, Tolmec artifacts and think: what’s left, after all? What gets to tell the story of a whole civilization? We live in the illusion of permanent archival of our ideas and achievements but we don’t control what happens after us. In the study process before this, Ursula K Le Guin was incredibly inspiring with her book “Always Coming Home”, which explores the idea that history is not necessarily an unstoppable progress. TECHNICAL DETAILS For this collection, Andrea wanted to combine the real and the imaginary. All artifacts come from real photos of real objects, then aged. This is because a relic must be a specific object, not an idea of it. It’s that magnet you have on the fridge. It’s that ugly mug you got for your birthday. Maybe it will traverse the centuries and get to tell our story. Andrea even built an app to automate the aging process so that it could feel more like photography rather than generation. The sites, on the other hand, are mostly generated from scratch to give them a stronger emotional impact. Andrea probably designed more than a thousand to come to these ten. SHORT ARTIST BIO Andrea Ciulu is an Italian visual artist working in post-photography. He explores the themes of memory, nostalgia, oblivion, aided by technology and sometimes exploiting its limits. Having worked for more than 20 years in the creative industry, his relationship with images and their manipulation is a long-standing one. No image is real.