These Water Portraits Reveal The Emotional Variety Of Humans In Distress

My name is Gabriele Corni, my photographic idea was created and promoted by GALLLERIAPIÙ and it's APNEA Humans Breathless cross-media project. An archive of one hundred water portraits exhibited in an “imaginary venue” where the space created by Claudio Silvestrin interacts with water, shaping an innovative work accessible thanks to the technological realization of Vitruvio Virtual Reality.

Through an analogy between the immersions in water and those in daily life, the project investigates the shortness of breath in today's society, with the intention to document the emotional variety of humans in distress. Each portrayed subject writes anonymously his/her desire, which in the poetic of the work stands for the breath, his/her personal motivation to dive daily into reality.

International partnerships with galleries and cultural associations make this photographic project itinerant. An artbook, published in collaboration with Damiani Editore, will include a selection of portraits, part of the architectural project by Claudio Silvestrin and images from the 3D experience.

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In this project water represents the everyday. The casing that contains us.

I find it very interesting to portray people in apnea. Each time I am fascinated to see that - while breathless - we are forced to abandon any ideal projection of ourselves. The awareness of “being portrayed” and the resulting willingness to “looking good” are completely undermined by the urgent and inalienable need to breathe.

“Apnea reveals our self-control, forcing us to violently experience our deep attachment to breath.” Gabriele Corni

I wanted to interpret this condition as a “state of procured sincerity”. An unusual investigation field on the surfacing of emotions and expressiveness.

Our strength, character and sensitivity can be frozen in a reportage-style image. There are no places, neither contingencies but lonely individuals, facing their own limitations. A real struggle, which suggests an analogy with the more or less prolonged apnea in our everyday life.

Into water as in life, we experience more or less “submerged” states of awareness - of ourselves, of our desires and real objectives. To every person I portrayed I asked to write a desire, that in the poetic of the work stands for their breath, their personal motivations that give meaning to life in “shortness of breath” and give them the power to go on following their goals. I consider these individual yet universal aims as integral part of the work.

Even when the subject is not completely immersed, these portraits want to narrate the alternation between emerged and submerged states that mark our time.