Giacomo Infantino - Those Dreams That Do Not Wake Up
Author Fresh Eyes Team
Artist Giacomo Infantino
Instagram giacomo_infantino_
Website giacomoinfantino.com
For many of us, there was one significant moment in which a realization hit of the strange liminality of the global pandemic: the devastation was visceral at times and distant at others, yet the reality of the situation, and the global unity of distinct people all confined to their homes, verged on implausibility. Giacomo Infantino's photographic series Those Dreams That Do Not Wake Up was born out of an exploration of this phase following the lockdown.
The predictability of fabricated scenarios clashes against the incertitude inherent in the photographic act, and dispels the assuredness of a perfectly staged photograph. Lucid dreams, fear, rage, violence, all coloured in new tones in the wake of the profound paradigm shift brought about by the pandemic, are manifested in Infantino's abstracted images. They seem to exist in some vacuum of the dreamscape, escape from which seems uncertain — as is suggested in the almost sinister wording of the project's title itself. The figures stand isolated and detached in their eerie pastoral landscape, and the blurred outlines of his figures seem at danger of slipping away, back into the depths of the inky darkness that is the playground of dreams and nightmares alike.
The photographs bear no signs of contemporaneity, and yet find their root in our immediate past, which has been dominated by the "double-edged knife" of the new digital era — the key image in the series is of an 11 year old boy, subjected to years of psychological torment at the hand of his peers, whose plight has only worsened with the onset of the lockdown, as the discrimination continues online. Lit from below, he strikes a figure at once imposing and gentle, a negotiation of different conflicting human conditions. Those Dreams That Do Not Wake Up places the viewer not in the shoes of the dreamer, but in the shoes of the dream itself.
Giacomo Infantino (1993) is an Italian-born photographer currently living and working between Berlin and Milan. At the moment, he is pursuing a Masters degree in Photography and Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan. You can support his latest book campaign, a self-initiated project towards publishing his photobook “A second to the found terminus”, through Selfself, which is a crowdfunding platform for photographic projects.