Nobody in Italy, Labyrinth

Diptychs

We all prefer a sense of belonging to being from nowhere or being alone. Thinking about this, the exercise I do with my photographs is to explore loneliness. I investigate absence. I look for lonely places. The composition of my images is made of everyday spaces that if it were not for my search for emptiness, suddenly, we would not see. They are places where it would be ideal if there was someone because their aesthetics merit it, but there is no one. I photograph nostalgia, what could be but is not. The beautiful place where some people should be smiling, but there is no one.

This photographic series is an investigation into melancholy. I find beauty in lonely places. That must be why I like rainy days, they have the same dose of nostalgia as places without people.

I am Colombian, my first surname is Italian. And although I grew up in Colombia, my photographic work took me to Italy in search of the origin. From this field work came ‘Nobody in Italy Labyrinth’. A series that invites us to imagine a world of possibilities behind every door or every window. A world of paths…. All lonely and endless… a labyrinth.

I don’t know where the need to see the world from a nostalgic point of view comes from. Maybe these two sentences can help us to understand this feeling:

“The day was warm, but a little sad, as Sunday in Paris usually is; especially when one does not believe in God.”

Michel Houellrbecq,

Enlargement of the Battlefield

“To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”

Paul Auster, Moon Palace

If opposites contain each other, working with ‘absence’ is an apology for ‘belonging’. It is a promise suspended in the air… it is melancholy.

Marcela Bellini

This exhibition brings together 12 photographs from the latest research of the artist Marcela Bellini Cure. It features the series Nobody in Italy, labyrinth, a collection of large-format black-and-white images printed on silk, where the artist reflects on absence and the solitude that envelops the settings she portrays. These are a series of “non-places,” spaces typically intended for gathering and inhabitation, which, through her lens, are shown devoid of people, shrouded in nostalgia and melancholy.

In Nobody in Italy, labyrinth Marcela rescues from everyday indifference the facades with intriguing elements and architectural details from traditional Italian streets, where the visual tension centers around the appearance of doors and windows imbued with beauty and mystery.

Inspired by this search and attraction to the nostalgia evoked by these indeterminate, solitary, and empty spaces—absent of human participation—the artist guides the viewer through a fantastical journey. In this journey, she plays with the illusion of reality in the layered scenes that emerge behind each door once opened within the compositions. A sense of relief washes over the viewer as they discover the images awaiting behind these doors. Paths, beaches, and labyrinths—stone and vegetation labyrinths—unfold before the gaze, revealing a universe that invites careful exploration and cautious passage. In each photograph, the paths revealed behind every door and window function as thresholds, as transitional spaces leading to another reality, another dimension. Through these openings, Marcela evokes intricate and dizzying worlds, which within her harmonious compositions are subtly transformed into something believable.

Irina Rolón
Curator

May 2018

Nobody in Italy, Labyrinth

Other series

A conversation between Asia and the West

Magical Realism

New York Oneiric

Nobody

Nobody II

Nobody in Italy

Nobody in Orsomarso