ITALY

Instagram @ andrea.graziosi.00

Andrea Graziosi is an Italian photographer. Born in 1977, he grew up in a village in central Italy, one of the most visited spiritual and pilgrimage sites in Italy. Between the mid-90s and 2004, he contributed his research and artistic experiences to the underground culture, engaging in various collective projects dedicated to the dissemination of experimental arts. Through his work, he conducts research into the correlations that humans maintain with other forms of life. Evoking and working with ontological notions related to concepts of animal becoming, parallel dimensions, fracture, and estrangement, he aims to create photographic works in which the placement of the printed object is decisive. In 2015, he published his first book, "Nunc Stans," with André Frère Editions. In 2022, the project "ANIMAS" received the Políptico Award and the Third Prize Gomma Grant. Currently, he is working on three new editorial projects.

In the center of Sardinia, in different villages within the territory of Barbagia, strange and archaic traditions are deeply rooted. Practiced by the inhabitants, these ancestral cults represent an intense and brutal relationship that humans maintain with the wild, carrying a mystical, spiritual, and sacred value, with a cathartic and liberating purpose. These disguises belong to a time that doesn't belong to us, the mask is a destiny, the link of an unsettling relationship between the human-animal and divinity; wearing a mask signifies metamorphosing into the form of another entity. The threatening and unsettling nature produced by these masks isn't meant to frighten the other, but rather to provoke a relationship with "the other." The inhabitants of this region use the term "Animas" to define something that has neither time nor body, a disturbing and wild time, something that is specifically non-human and serves to live an experience. "ANIMAS" is the result of a research and production effort that has lasted for more than eight years.