QUARENTINE - Social isolation in the pandemic" exhibition

Clausura

One of the clearest reflections I had during this remarkable year is that Pandemic and Isolation are not the same phenomenon. Pandemic is an event of a collective nature, affecting public health, science, and politics. Isolation is an event of a psychological nature, with impact on mental health, self-esteem and our connection to ourselves and our values, it is a pause, an opportunity, and a moment of revelation. Claudio Edinger understood this and decided to venture into an initiative to capture the spirit of one's cloisteredness in a rare moment of synchronicity of situations. The result is lyrical.

The portrait as a distant witness of a compulsory isolation. A kind of clear mirage of someone in a diffuse context, a half impossible alien point of view. A photograph that was not seen, but captured. The search for the lowest common denominator of what each person took to their island of isolation. The minimum condition of permanence that reveals the personality of each person portrayed, his guitar, his nakedness, his bathtub, his place. The condition of reclusion humanises us, shows us vulnerable and real.

The event of the 2020 pandemic is one of the most important facts in our history, but an event that produced few images. Out of respect for the victims, and the contexts of isolation, the pain has materialised in the form of numbers and graphs. But the memory of an entire generation will be marked by what happened in its intimate space. That is why this project is really unique, it reveals something about a void common to all.

To be able to photograph the emptiness of each one seems to me an ambitious engagement. Photography always values capturing the moment of action in its fullness. Edinger, sought to portray the opposite, the non-action, the boredom, the waiting, the infinite contemplation of time respecting each environment as the context that protects and identifies them.

Claudio Edinger is an experienced photographer in the multiple possibilities of photographic languages, but he was absolutely happy to develop a technical solution that translated our zeitgeist. When I was photographed by him I understood the change in the geometry of the relationship between photographer, subject and drone. The Drone acts as its own entity, inoculating reality with a robotic intervention that positions itself between the humans who act there at its service. The system has defined the point of view, distancing is an imperative. The Drone delimits this. The photo is the portrait of a situation, not necessarily of a person. That is when the context reveals itself and says something about the time we are in.

There is something artificial in the photographs, they all seem staged, but therein lies the greatest truth of the project, the situation we live is artificial, it generates a certain estrangement of ourselves with our intimacy. We had to invent a new intimate space, inject a dose of dream into life that was proving repetitive, develop abandoned talents, connect with others in new ways. Quarantine life did not feel real to us and the new normality never became natural. This is made explicit in the saturation of stronger-than-life colours and the sharp composition of each photo. Over the years I have learned that the greatest truths are told in the lies.

Marcello Dantas

SERVICE

QUARENTENA - The social isolation in the pandemic | Claudio Edinger
Lume Gallery
02.04.2022 - 07.05.2022
R. Gumercindo Saraiva 54, Jd Europa, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Monday to Friday 10h-19h and Saturday 11h-15h