Nicola Bertellotti from Pietrasanta (LU)
How your way of working has changed?
Everything has changed, in a radical way. My photography is inextricably linked to travel, to being almost always “away from home” and then, after exactly after 10 years, for the first time my great adventure in search of abandoned places came to an abrupt halt. I was planning a photographic tour in Eastern Europe these days, I hope to be able to recover it at least by the end of 2020.
We are dealing with a new time and space. What are you discovering or rediscovering about yourself?
Actually all this isolation, this social distance, it is quite familiar to me. I know it, it may seem bizarre, but the decadent and desolate environments that I frequent for my work have, as it were, prepared me for the dramatic scenes of our deserted cities. A world that increasingly resembles the third landscape, theorized by Gilles Clément. I adapted to this new time by rediscovering my home as if it were a cabinet of curiosities, an unprecedented interest was born in objects accumulated over the years that were previously invisible. The hypnotic power of one's home as a museographic archive.
What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
I miss the contact with nature, the fields to go through the mud up to the ruin to be immortalized. I miss the adrenaline before every shooting, because everything is precarious in what I do but it is precisely that uncertainty that I love. I miss spending the night on the computer planning the next trip, to place pins on the map like the police do in television series. I miss that wonderful tiredness at the end of a day spent taking pictures in some foreign country. I miss so many loved ones, one above all.
To date, what have been the immediate consequences of the spread of Covid-19 on your work for you and what do you think the long-term consequences may be?
I had to cancel explorations already planned both abroad and in Italy and some exhibition projects that I was very keen on missed. I will be on display in Rome for mid-June, I'm confident, there is a great desire to leave. The news that arrives every day keeps us in constant anguish, everything takes a back seat when the numbers of those tragic losses arrive. It's hard to focus on your work but, even if nothing will be the same, the time of beauty and carefree will return.
Nicola Bertellotti Pietrasanta was born (LU) in 1976. What emerges in his aesthetic is the nostalgia for lost paradise, expressed in love for ruins, and the photographic reinterpretation of decadent poetics. He has exhibited in various contemporary art galleries and museums; among the main exhibitions: Phenomenology of the end, Above the loggias, Pisa (2013); Here are the dragons, Castel dell’Ovo, Naples (2016); Aftermath, Isculpture gallery, San Gimignano (2017). In the summer 2019 the Pärnu Museum in Estonia dedicates a personal exhibition to him The Great Beauty, the photographer's homage to the great abandoned Italian beauty. His works are present in various public and private collections and have appeared in prestigious magazines, among which: Esquire, Art, Lampoon, image, Daily Mail. Its reference galleries are Sensi Arte, Colle di Val d’Elsa; Ponzetta Gallery, Pietrasanta and Alidem, Milan. www.nicolabertellotti.com