Monica Smaniotto has several things to tell about herself and photography, waiting to exhibit at Liquida PhotoFestival from May 5 to May 22. Collater.al asked the photographer to tell about her shots, which link man to nature as if it were a work of land art.

1. Tell us about the project you will exhibit at Liquida PhotoFestival

They are a series of images made in the immersion of mountain nature, the one where I grew up. It is a project dedicated to the relationship between man and nature, but also to the warmth and life hidden inside the stone, where man occupies forms and fills the spaces that nature has left him. The static nature of the body searches for the inner movement among the folds of the existing.

2. What does ”liquid world” mean to you, the same world that will host your exhibition?

A liquid does not have its own form but can have one if placed in a container. This indefinite state of form I associate with changeable being. Our body is a container, but the being changes continuously according to the environment, events and infinite factors. 
Just as water evaporates when heated or freezes when placed in a freezer, a liquid can only change its form due to external forces – heat and cold, fire, earth. Liquid life, like liquid-modern society, does not know how to keep its shape, it flows and is never the same, I think it is fundamental to evolve, to know oneself, to be able to look beyond.

3. In your shots, bodies placed in nature look like works of land art. How do you research the relationship between the human figure and the landscape?

In my shots there is a conceptual recovery of the body in a performative practice intertwined with both the landscape and the existential dimension and life experiences, mine but also of the person posing. The naked body finds and shows itself aware of what it sees. Who lives in the photograph, lives in me, time stops and space dialogues.
Beyond the body there is an action, not just form or superficial stylistic choice. Personally it is a declaration of strength, energy, freedom, independence, virtually screamed through photography.

4. What is your earliest memory related to the world of photography?

My mother’s slide projector, I loved the noise it made as soon as she turned it on, the fact of darkening a room to see the image of my sister and I at the beach as babies, or my father cradling me in my pajamas as a newborn. Something that I had experienced and yet did not remember was there, impalpable on the wall, a magic, that particular moment of life had been captured, I was happy that that projector existed.

5. Your imagery tends towards an almost dreamlike dimension, how important is evasion from reality for you and how much does it influence everyday life?

I love going alone in nature, walking in the woods, discovering, searching, getting lost, finding myself, getting scared. I find these places isolated and far from the signs of civilization, but also hard, rocky, almost anti-human, suggestive and exciting as the places of the mind can be. Nature, like music, art, movies, poetry, myths, dreams, influence and fascinate me, from there I draw and allow me to develop an imaginary. In particular the myth, is opposed to reality, but at the same time is a true speech. The myth and the dream are two forms of the imaginary, but they are also two ways of representing a sense that must be deciphered, a primordial sense that concerns the past of the psyche and humanity.