Still/s Strangers - ITALY/UK/USA/SPAIN/PORTUGAL 2010 - copyright 2010 Francesco Caradonna

a work by Francesco Caradonna from 6th to 30th April 2010 Tatà Theatre, Taranto, Italy sponsored by European Union and Teatri Abitati.

Still/s Strangers is a project, a concept born as a photographic exhibition accompanied by the projection of "Untitled#700", an experimental short movie that takes inspiration from the experience and the vision of Carlos Castaneda.
The purpose is trying to keep an analogue approach to the reality rather than take it into a mechanical digital world; analogue photography makes the artist a seeker and the camera an understanding-tool to reach knowledge, a deeper way which allows you to explore the human being interaction. The inspiration behind comes from the poetic works of such great photographers as Henry Cartier-Bressons, Eliott Erwitt, Gianni Berengo Gardìn, new content framing the small world where we live, with all its contradictions, beauty and characters in their daily landscapes. The meanings of reality increase their amount letting the artist see things that we couldn't see in a digital masturbation of the actual world.

Where are the human beings? Who can still be considered a human being rather than a stranger? How stranger we are to our own life? how stranger am I in my own city? Who's the real stranger? What's real?

Still/s Strangers is a journey, a visceral research throughout an unconventional universe, where streets and people are inhabited by strangers, their own stories and life becomes the main subjects of this research. It explores points of time and narrations which cross each other merged in the moment the time has been immobilized. There is an obsession and a deep desire in observing the humans, looking over their dreams and hopes, their joy and their madness, undertaking diverse hidden ways to describe their emotions. There is an existential void, an orror vacui which define their existences, taken away from New York, London, Barcelona, Lisbon, Milan and Taranto. All these humans go through the mechanical eye, their reflection of the light condensed within the 35-mm-instant which gives them their fake immortality, eternal memories as ambitious as an attempt of escaping the inevitable.

All of them unconscious and unawarely walking toward the last act, whenever it will be happening. For the artist the photography becomes the ultimate witness who sees the inevitable condition of being human beings, their arrogance, weakness, energy and life or fear. There is a sight and a Fate who plays with their identities as a stranger in a world of strangers may do.

It's moving along the streets and walking through the roads that we find all this material, a humanity continuously showing its emotions, trying to stop for the time a while in order to think, enjoy, embrace, realise; it is about being aware and conscious; it is about perceive that the reality is not only what we do know about the reality itself. It is on those streets that we try to better know ourselves and the things around us; it is on those streets that we can bump into a shaman and learn the ancient knowledge of the Tolteq culture: a way to achieve knowledge more than The Knowledge itself. Here it is something to absolutely save from the old world in order to face a drastic spiritual and biological evolution in the new one. This is an analogue way of thinking to better use and not to abuse the ultra-technological environment and tools.

As a quote from the short movie says: 
“As you know, the world doesn’t exist; exists only a description of it that you learned to see clearly and take seriously.”
The research of Caradonna focuses on what is hidden in the reality, what we see is not always what we perceive, Common images that open the sight to indescribable stories, glimpses of human landscapes. The research of a shared frequency where our bodies' masses travel getting closer and crossing each other, passing through the cultural differences and distances.