Project Description
In the center of Sardinia, in different villages of the territory of Barbagia, strange and archaic traditions live well anchored. Practiced by the inhabitants, ancient cults represent an intense and brutal relationship that man maintains with the wild and carry a mystical, spiritual and sacred value, with a cathartic and liberating goal. These costumes belong to a time that does not belong to us, to hide is a destiny, the hyphen of a disturbing relationship between the being-animal and the divinity; to wear a mask means to metamorphose into the form of another entity. The threatening and disturbing that these masks produce does not have the function of frightening the other, but it is to provoke a relationship with the other. The inhabitants of this region use the expression Animas to define something that has neither time nor body, once disturbing, wild, is what is specifically non-human and serves to live an experience.
Bio
Born in 1977, Andrea Graziosi grew up in Loreto, a village in central Italy, one of the most visited places of spirituality and pilgrimage in Italy. Between the mid-1990s and 2004, he brought his research and artistic experiences into the world of underground culture. In 2004 he completed his university studies in Letters and Philosophy, with a thesis on the representation of the transgression of the Image in contemporary photography, with special mention from the jury, at the University of Bologna. The same year, he left Italy to settle in France. After training in photography at the École de l’Image aux Gobelins in 2010, Andrea Graziosi began working as a freelance photographer and decided to develop these photographic projects. Since then, he has been carrying out his research on the correlations that human beings have with other forms of life. Evoking and working on ontological notions related to the concepts of animal becoming, parallel dimensions, fracture, strangeness, he aims to produce photographic works, in which the place of the printed object is decisive. In 2015, publishes his first book, Nunc Stans – La Sainte Victoire, with Éditions André Frère. In 2022 he won the Polyptyque prize with the “Animas” project. In 2022, the ANIMAS project won the Polyptyque Award and the third Gomma Grant. Currently, he is working on three new publishing projects.
ANIMAS
Hariban Award 2023