Existential loneliness, isolated suburbia, and millennial culture: these are the keywords of my latest photography project.
artist: Ludovica De Santis
project: Untilted
Exhibited at Safelight Berlin from August 19th to September 16th, 2023.
The series "Untitled" focuses on life in Italian suburbs, reporting a motionless condition where reality hasn’t changed since two decades ago. The effects of geographic conditions on social realities are significant.
Stagnation or progressiveness is largely conditioned by geographic surroundings which affect the psychological and psychic tendencies of a community.
The state of isolation in these man-made situations brings people to experience social isolation, therefore, dragging them into so-called "emotional isolation", the unwillingness or inability to share feelings. Phenomena such as technological retardation, outdated trends and obscurantism define the Italian suburban lifestyle where inhabitants are used to dealing with abandonment, mainly because feeling discarded from society.
Lives are lived out in neighborhoods, cities, and states, and the physical and social features of these places can affect the behaviors, thoughts, and emotions experienced. This series explores the existential and psychological condition of the Italian provincia in Central Italy - which means basically “suburbs and small towns outside of Rome”, analyzing the state of desolation as a result of people’s psychological characteristics due and within the places they live in. This research is based on the idea of "geographical psychology" or "spatial psychology" which comes from the original concept of “Psychogeography” and aims to understand psychological phenomena based on their spatial distribution and their interactions with macro-level features of environments. Psychogeography was developed by members of the Letterist International and Situationist International, which were revolutionary groups influenced by Marxist and anarchist theory as well as the attitudes and methods of Dadaists and Surrealists. In 1955, Guy Debord defined psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
