just melusina: March 2013

After having pushed all SL photography lovers to experiment William Waevers's Phototools (Weaver's Project), Anita Witt created a wonderful place for artists (and not only for them), the desert of Dryland.
It's a SIM entirely covered by sand, where a few wrecks (ships, carriages, cars, UFO) peeks out from the dunes and two disrupted buildings talk about the humans who have been there.

Entering these buildings is a surprise: they are art galleries, where artists (Anita first) show how life (in the form of art) can flower even on a desert and supposed death background.

It isn't the only sign of life there: among the dunes another artwork talks about life and fecondity. It's the huge Pallina 80's installation "Fertility" where symbols of life are mixed up to parts of a "machine of happiness", a red and yellow Circus that gives colors to the endless sand stretch.

The first exhibit the guest gallery has hosted has been dedicated to the SIM itself: Anita invited some photographers (I got the honor to be among them) to shoot the land. A feast for for minimalism lovers and a good challenge for photographers who tried to pull out "something" from the "Void".

It's been a great surprise to me when Anita invited me to make the second gallery's exhibition. Anita asked me for a selection of pictures about Urban Landscapes: another striking contrast with the desert that would host the show.

(Exhibition poster, by Anita Witt)

Cities are the horizon to almost all of us: even the wish of peaceful natural places that makes people building and hanging out at a lot of wonderful gardens and forests in SL is a sign of a deep relationship with cities. We love and hate narrow streets, crowdy avenues, tall buildings, streetlamps, metros, factories, power plants, stores and theaters, taxi and buses. It's our Heaven and our Hell. However, We can't ignore them, we can't avoid to be influenced by them, to desire its opportunities and to try improving their and our life there.
Cities are our way of life, since centuries. We can't think of our world without them. Neither a virtual world.

From Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927)

So, SL is full with cities, small and big, decayed or well ordered, on a river or on the seashore, among mountains or in the prairie... Some of them are copies of RL ones, some others forecast our hopes or our fears for the future, some others celebrate "happy old times". All of them have those shops, those streetlamps, those "nests" (our homes) we know and we love in RL. No matter if houses are poor and distressed, or lamps are gas or laser ones. Or even if buildings are Art deco, Victorian or Futurist ones. They are towns and cities, they are our own landscapes.
My photos try to catch some of the different meanings builders wanted to give to their creations: portraying large views of towns, focusing details, watching the former "pumping hearts" of the cities (factories and industries), showing the cities' past. Each floor of the exhibit is dedicated to one of these themes: views, details, industry, retro.
There are no humans in the pictures. This is because cities have their own life, different from the humans' one and different from the one they lives with humans. Cities are not stones, but residents wrote a scholar of a far past. I think cities are ALSO stones, living stones even without people crowding them. They are my pictures' protagonists.