Waithood, a portmanteau composed of “wait” and “adulthood”, is a period of stagnation in the lives of the youth, unemployed and newly graduated, in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), India, etc. It can be described as “a kind of prolonged adolescence”, during which a large proportion of these guys spend its best years waiting.Waiting for a job, waiting for economic independency, waiting for the decisive transition from adolescence to adulthood.

After the 2008 economic crisis, this term can be easily applied to the young europeans as well, who, after having ended their studies, start to wait, seek and hope. The national borders do not exist anymore, it is way easier to travel, searching desperately somewhere else what you cannot find in your own country, in order to stop waiting.

It’s been a while since I have reached this life’s period and it is hard to see the end of it.

Trying to find a solution I’ve started to move myself, almost compulsively, between Portugal, Italy and United Kingdom, hoping to be fulfilled in one of these countries. My generation grew up with the belief that everything it’s possible, but, finally, it finds itself alone and hopeless, with no inclination to compromise. Escaping elsewhere seems one of the best reliefs, but it leads to more loneliness and indifference from the surrounding world.

The stability’s search ends up in wandering, without any direction.

Is Petrus a dance? Is it a choreography? Is it a minuet (which of course is a contradiction because a minuet needs two. But who says that for an artist the other can not be a subject, a theme or a fascination?). At least Petrus it is a highly concentrated and very delicate chain of steps sideways. After the sidestep a brief reorientation, a gracious gesture towards the other and another step sideways. The gestures are kept in memory.

One circle completed, one step backwards and another circle is begun, concentric. The sidesteps are smaller or wider, depending on the time the new circle should take, how long the glances should be, how many facets of the other should be scrutinised and how intensely. Actually, the minuet is strange. One moving delicately, the other staying where the dance started, diplomatically watching his (Petrus is probably a man) shoes, if shoes there are.

Stepping backwards and forwards between the circles. Choosing the distance to the other, playing with it. Attracting the other, sending him off, but he can not move anyway, he can not escape through the circular movements. He is caught by being looked at.

At first, the more a circle is distant, the more sidesteps can be taken, the more facets can be observed. But from a certain distance on things are getting less precise. So back inwards. Or back and forth. Distance becomes matter, material, the width of the steps sideways and the length of the ones back and forth become form as much as the the glances at the other and the gestures that follow the glances. Steps, glances and gestures become a partitura… at first circular, then unfolding linear…

Veit Stratmann

We live in a society in which our visual perceptions are bombarded all the time. Every single day in front of our eyes a huge amount of pictures of war and devastation flows, and we do not seem to feel any kind of feelings about them - we no longer “see” them. The bodies and the faces we keep on absorbing are turning us into alleged unaware voyeurs, and still we remain accustomed to pictures that neither offend us nor urge us to reflect. The paradox of that is we are driven to reflect only when a picture doesn’t show all those war-related elements, such as dead bodies or weapons.

With the reportage photographs of my private archives, shot during four years to document the Ukrainian war – from the riots in Maidan Square, to the parting of the Crimea, to the war in Donbass – I reconstruct such events with overlaps, cuts and corrosions. The aim is to create a different iconographic repertoire, to revise and to change the way to tell the war, without erasing the historical and cultural roots of such events. A work that tastes Soviet with echoes of constructivism.

A language that speaks “Perestroika” (Russian for “restructuring”), that refers to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system during the 80’s, that aimed to do reforms and to soften the Soviet regime. However, these efforts failed and led the Soviet regime to an end. That probably marked the starting point of the current tensions in Ukraine. Another failure has also been the unethical way to talk about war: so that a new approach, able to stir up people’s feelings, is very much needed.

The second concept behind Perestroika is “Glasnost” (“openness”): that was about the (alleged) fight against corruption, and about freedom of expression. This same transparency is, almost literally, expressed by the artist via deleting the most improper elements of the photographs of war, i.e. the ones we are mostly accustomed to; as a paradox, censorship is used as powerful means of social condemnation. The bodies, already lifeless, are deprived of their own image, the latter being empty and anesthetized; the two- dimensional cut offers a three-dimensional perception, its weight and physical space hidden behind this void, a white shape that cannot leave us uninterested.

Text by Giulia Guidi

Irene Fenara's interest in theories of visual culture and the need to appropriate the tools of contemporaneity, which determine our way of seeing, become an opportunity to practice observation and reflection on images. Using an instrument usually foreign to art: that of surveillance cameras that acquire images for the sole purpose of environmental control, with Self Portrait from Surveillance Camera Fenara relates power and vision. The work bears the traces of a movement, that of the artist who goes from the studio to the surveillance camera and then saves the image that portrays her before the continuous flow cancels it 24 hours later. The artist's gaze, turned towards the lens, becomes an act of resistance to impose her own identity on the controlled world, a reversed point of view that makes us reflect on the always reversible relationship between the observer and the one being observed.

The concept of unheimlich, translated into english with the term uncanny, contains in its semantic complexity the same sense of impotence and disorientation that we feel when, visiting a place for the first time, we find ourselves in front of elements that seem familiar to us. This feeling triggers in us contrasting reactions like calm and fear. Recalling dreamlike situations in which reality and fiction are intertwined, the project is inspired by the aesthetic concept, that Sigmund Freud explored in the 1919 essay “Das unheimliche”.  When the labyrinthine space of the children’s Colony in the former Eni village at Corte di Cadore is investigated through the lens of this concept, we question the restless familiarity of this place: “Have I been here before?”.In the past two years, Giaime Meloni has spent intense and cyclical periods within the children’s Colony. Every visit was a renewed opportunity to establish a contact with the place, between visual memory and formal obsessions. Unheimlich is finally a metaphor of the condition of contemporary living. This experience emphasizes the human need to construct a domestic dimension within a generic space, working on the intangible but palpable register of the unconscious. The search for the territorial familiarity also includes in an antithetic way its negation, of which the unheumlich is the definition.The incessant repetition of some forms, subjects and colours within the sequence of images evokes the search for points of references that are capable of generating a sense of familiarity with the place.