The photographic projects of Davide Palombo and Michael Trutta were selected by PHocus Magazine through the ‘Confini’ Call, an initiative aimed at involving some of the most deserving students from Italy’s leading schools of photography and cinematography.
The theme of the Call “Confini”
There are geographical, natural, political, symbolic but also metaphorical boundaries and limits.
The extreme limit of the world, the limit of the mind, of knowledge, of science, the limit between life and death, of the lawful, of the just.
Where there is no visible boundary or boundary of the mind, one speaks of the unlimited, boundless.
When one speaks of the universe, one cannot think of a boundary.
This is also the case for the sea and the desert even though we know that there is in fact a boundary.
[…]
A frame can be a boundary that in turn contains boundaries or in which BORDERS are cancelled.
Possessing an image of one of our relatives effectively obliterates the boundary of age and temporal distance, but an image can also contain stories circumscribed in a specific, defined space.
Our whole existence has to do with the idea of a circumscribed space. We live, work and move in well-defined spaces and even time, which for reasons of physics is never separated from space, tends to be delimited.
The ‘Con’ before ‘Fine’ suggests that there can be aggregation and not separation from those beyond, contrary to what many think and the often discriminatory use of this term.
Boundary can create aggregation between those within it and separation from those outside it but, the word affinity is very similar and close and no one can take it for granted that there cannot be affinity with the excluded, at least until we have a way of verifying it.
Boundary can therefore also be interpreted as the possibility of sharing and not just exclusion.
THE SELECTED RUFA STUDENTS’ PROJECTS
“La guardo negli occhi con un sorriso strano” (2021-IN CORSO) by Davide Palombo
Countryside, dunes, car parks, villages, my green sea. Boredom, a still state. The province enveloped us as we grew within it. This has deeply connected me to the theme of youth within certain urban contexts. I want to talk about those sensations that I find far from the towns and cities and that confronted first my adolescence, and then adulthood.
Technical Notes: Davide Palombo realised his work with Hasselblad X1D M1 + XCD45 equipment.
Find out more about Davide’s project
“punto punto punto” by Michael Trutta
I have a tendency to have a visceral need to escape and run away from situations and people and I wondered about the motivations behind this attitude.
Walking in the woods near my house, I came across an abandoned film holder with a piece of film and a piece of paper inside, emerging from the earth. On the piece of paper was written a message in pen, a farewell letter apparently left by a person just before he ran away. I immediately began to wonder who this mysterious person was, where they were going, why they had left, why they had left traces.
This project is my personal photographic investigation starting with the analysis of the message and the development of the abandoned film.
The result is a jigsaw puzzle of images, created through still life, documentary photographs, archive material, notes, recordings from surveillance cameras, an attempt to understand, a rationalisation of my unconscious, a rediscovery of a past that dialogues with a hypothetical future scenario.
Perennially poised between a fiction and a document.
Technical notes: Michael Trutta shot his work with Hasselblad X1D M1 + XCD45 equipment.
