Emma Ciceri, 14 DICEMBRE 2010

Room 1

Reality wants to be the object of my research. The relationship with it is manifested through continuous contemplation: a prolonged, silent and meditative observation of something from within.
I work with simple gestures of selection of the real that together recreate a parallel reality. I am interested in the human story, the individual and the multitude.
I am constantly looking for individuality in the crowd, this is the pretext for continuous close observation of the like.
I attend rallies, concerts, funerals and events with a video camera in my hand. I take part in events by camouflaging myself in the crowd, which allows me to investigate the gestures, the bodies, the manifestations of small tensions of the individual. The crowd is the pretext, the event is the container of the human being to be observed, followed, recorded; the body is the envelope of an interiority that manifests itself.
Tensions and emotions take on multiple forms and aspects in the dialectic between subjectivity and multitude, self-affirmation and belonging to a group.
Emma Ciceri

Emma Ciceri’s work can be a response to the rhetoric of anonymity in the big city.
On the occasion of a student demonstration, Ciceri captured the square and its movements, its unstoppable energy.
With her ability to capture movement and stasis, with the light that affects and accentuates, with the saturated colours and the time dilation that she injects into the footage, the street proves to be a vital stall for individuals.
But in her images, of the young people who for a moment emerge from the crowd, we notice above all the always unique intensity of expression, the attitudes concentrated even in the chaos, the appearance and gestures that preside over meetings and relationships, so intimately linked to emotional states.
Social behaviour is revealed in its complexity: partly an unconscious expression, shaped by collective action, by the fact of taking part in a great mass ritual; partly the fruit of care and conscious attention: playing one’s part and offering oneself to the gaze of others that responds to codes and conventions, but can take bizarre forms.
The effect is cinematic, but without anything anecdotal or sentimental.The micro-reality that emerges from the video is part of the great, complex spectacle of everyday life and expresses our polyphonic society of individuals.
Gabi Scardi

Emma Ciceri was born in Ponte San Pietro (BG) in 1983.