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EACH SINGLE ITEM (BOOK, POSTARCARD, PRINTS) IS OFFERED WITH 3 PERK, DEPENDING ON THE COUNTRY OF DESTINATION: THE FIRST PERK IS FOR ITALY, THE SECOND IS FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION, THE THIRD IS FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD. FOR ANY QUESTIONS WRITE IN THE IN THE DISCUSSION TAB (ABOVE), OR SEND A MESSAGE TO INFO@ALESSANDROBAVARI.COM
KILL THE COVID! A photographic rural horror reportage
The finished book, printed in 1000 + copies, in four-color (CMYK) for a higher yield of tonal range of greys, will include approximately 96 black&white pages, written in italian and english:
19 artworks, 7 photo witnesses portraits, 18 photos from the local historical archives, some photographs of gadgets and souvenirs taken from the killed covids, as well as 16 stories of popular chronicle of the district and narration of settings and places where the facts occurred. The book will be made in sewn binding with a semi-rigid cover.
WHAT IS THE SUBJECT OF THE BOOK?
The project KILL THE COVID!, set in Italy in the Marche region, to Bura, one of the heterogeneous countryside districts, was born from the idea of Alessandro Bavari and Sara Aliscioni. Photographers by profession and by artistic choice, Alessandro together with Sara, tell us, through images and texts, an entirely rural saga of killing Covid, invisible to the human eye but tangible in this work.
The Covid-19, world famous number one enemy, now represented as an anthropomorphic monster with animalistic behaviors, as a mythological creature belonging to unknown countries, described with a grotesque, ridiculous and clumsy appearance unable to defend itself from it’s own hunters.
At the gates of the city of Tolentino, the villagers have absorbed the local’s popular legends narrated from generation to generation: many of these stories arise from oral traditions and historical memory of the dialect. Inherited from the tales of the elders, belonging to previous generations, the legendary trace the imaginary of the inhabitants of a century ago or, rather, those fantasies on the edge of reality.
The vehemence of popular culture combined with the collective imagination and the narrative skeleton, gives the volume a chimerical imprint made even more atavistic by photographic images.
Get accustomed to the tales of witches, werewolf, sounding pots, mysterious figures wandering in abandoned houses, lit bonfires, evil eyes and hexes, silhouettes appearing in the night near the Devil’s bridge, fearless, merciless autochthonous confront, fight capture, mistreat, mock and kill the Covid by showing the trophy and what remains of its limbs.
A sort of secret movement fighting to defeat the new monster with what you have: hoes, shovels, pitchforks, sticks, chainsaws, axes, punches and kicks.
We cannot fail to also consider the history of the people from Marche which originates far from the Piceni, or warriors people from Middle Italy: “Their name picus derives from the animal sacred to the divinity Mars, the woodpecker. This bird, in fact, under his guidance, indicated the path to the founders of the Piceno people who arrived in the Marche starting from Sabina”.
New forged warriors face the enemy, espouse the cause, and devote themselves to practice by proudly displaying their trophy.
SOME EXAMPLES OF THE PAGES TAKEN FROM THE BOOK
Beating and drowning in the tank
Driven out from the shed of the old farmhouse, camouflaged among the hanging sausages, the Covid is dragged and thrown into the tank used for the degreasing and flaying of slaughtered poultry and pigs. While he struggles, Maurizio and Nazareno drown him throwing a flurry of punches with the help of the women intent on guarding to avoid his escape. The goal is to cause him death by drowning, cursing: che pozzi muri sfiatatu!*
*In the Marche dialect: “may you die without breath!”
Beheading
To avoid contact, Laura lifts the head of the decapitated covid with a stick, like a trophy, and then throws it into the lime tub a few meters from the woodshed. The dog Nala gorges itself with blood and guts that cause him to suffer from severe dysentery in the following days, but he manages to survive.
Killing with facial mutilation
While Guerrino realizes how much the anatomy of the covid is similar to the human one, the cat Igor, darling of the house, insists with his tongue between the bowels of the corpse. After three days of agony, he is found dead in the tool shed. This angers the family that promises revenge: 10 covids to kill for every dead cat.
THE POPULAR SAGA OF 19 SHOTS
A story with a harsh, rough, grotesque and rural artistic solution, Kill the Covid! wants to represent the defeat of the virus at the hands of the inhabitants of the Bura, therefore in metaphorical terms at the hands of man.
Nineteen photographic representations in which digital elements have been inserted depicting the “Covid monster”, like the namesake of the virus, in 19 different guises.
The reading of the images develops in the following phases:
1. Hunting
2. Capture
3. Torture
4. Mockery
5. Killing
6. Recovery of the remains
7. Contempt of the corpse
8. Trophy display
9. Deproteinization and plastination
This collection is placed in the mysterious dimension of local legends made of stories, of perceptions outside the real and ordinary conception, of monstrous apparitions such as Covid.
The events of usual life transformed by the imagination of the locals, have given life over the centuries to mythological stories shaped by the hands of the same. Jealously preserved in their memories, these have been returned amalgamated with the imagination induced by the unconscious.
In the Marche plot of evil eyes, hexes and sorcerers, witches and ghosts, the written texts, together with the visual and photographic narration, refer at the same time, to the ancient and the modern in an intense and rural setting characterized by the countryside of the district, the fields of sunflowers, woods, and the old farmhouses surrounded by the countryside courtyard.
Those who remain are the custodians of those magical formulas, handed down from generation to generation, capable of exorcising every curse.
Collectively accepted, beliefs in the power of rituals and words that evoke something or someone made it possible for the virus to materialize into a visible and tangible monster.
However, the alchemy between what has been remembered and what has been decoded has given shape to a macroscopic archetype of Covid with both human and animal features, with a grotesque and clumsy appearance, whose only gift is a congenital and obstinate stupidity.
An alchemy between photographic reality and digital vision capable of showing the angry, vindictive, sarcastic and cynical protagonists, heirs of the sacred and pagan popular vocation enriched by a symbolic imagery still alive in the memories of the elderly.
A saga that tells the inhabitants’ revenge, persecuted for a long time by legendary figures, invisible but present in their minds, recalled by the holders of memories where the monster is now tangible, hunted and killed.
Quel ch’s’fa d’nott, s’arsa de giorn.
“What was done at night you know during the day” which is why the inhabitants hunt, capture, shoot down, kill, retrieve and display the trophy at night, in the light of the flash and the full moon.
AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY
Alessandro, who grew up in an Italian-French family, is immediately attracted to art and for this reason he decides to study it in all its aspects, so much so that he begins to deal with photography since he was 15 years. He studies scenography, photography, art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, developing a great knowledge in various artistic techniques, from oil painting to watercolor, from chalcography to photography. Over the years, he portrays human and animal subjects, landscapes and architecture, which are added to his imagery, strongly influenced - furthermore - by both the allegories of Indo-European culture and by the artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Since 1993 he has been using personal digital processing techniques, developing an artistic language, “a sort of contamination between the arts, dissolving the boundaries that distinguish them”.
He has collected several achievements as a featured artist.
Among his main photographic and video works: Metachaos, Ludi Florales, Aibohphobia, Sodom and Gomorrah.
Relatively the latter, it is an postmodern series of photograph-paintings where the deeply dark and abyssal images of a lost world of the legendary cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are staged, as if returned to life from ashes.
Sara has dedicated herself to photography and photographic calligraphy since 2006. She has matured the artistic matrix from her father, musician and composer, which led her to explore not only the world of theater, to which she has dedicated herself for several years both as an interpreter who as a stage photographer, but also of music, studying classical solfeggio and bass for several years, as well as cinema, influenced by the Experimental Center of Cinematography where her father worked as a sound engineer.
In addition to the various courses on photographic techniques and workshops dedicated to travel reportage, she followed the training promoted by MoMA on photography as a means of individual artistic expression, as a technique for exploring reality and documentation of society as well as a tool for communication and criticism of our culture.
Among the activities followed, Sara has curated several photographic backstage works, the latest among them at the Macro Museum in Rome. After having increased her knowledge on photographic art, she has also matured her style thanks to Alessandro’s continuous and daily training.
United by photography as an expression of art, as well as by their personal bond, together they have created this project, one of a kind and perfectly aligned with their common way of producing “visions”.
WHY TO BUY KILL THE COVID?
The project was born during the contingency of Covid, the virus of the same name that has affected the whole world without distinction.
The two authors, adopting a sarcastic key, through their visionary creativity, return to the public the representation of evil, in an unreal, imaginative, grotesque, crude and cynical guise with the aim of exorcising it.
KILL THE COVID!, with its ineluctable, biting and sarcastic story and its photographic vision, also has the ambition to give a warning so that man understands the importance of maintaining the balance of nature which, in its sovereignty, takes back what belongs even without mercy. Man can be cruel but nature can be more so.
It is therefore necessary to start afresh from the system, from its management and from responsible behavior towards a fair, sustainable future, respectful of nature, animals and man.
The people of the Marches, with their vocation for the territory and the preservation of traditions, represent an example and this place is the perfect setting chosen by the authors.