– it dios argentina – serie
***I have now changed the name to CHAOS Existential Art Project***
The -it dios-* project was born unknowingly it in October 2019 in Neuquén, Patagonia Argentina, when I returned from my trip to the United States. This was going to be a move but it only lasted 9 months; I had left very conflicted with my family and personal history, and it was very difficult to continue moving forward. Upon returning to Argentina, I returned to live in the family home where my mother and maternal grandmother were. A few months later, the pandemic began, leaving us locked up. My reaction was an attack of gastroenteritis, and the emergency medical service had to come to help me. This was the beginning of a long and deep process of personal genealogical healing.
Seeing each other’s faces (our own and other’s) at all times, the conflicts did not take long to resurface. My grandmother with her cognitive deterioration, my mother with anxiety attacks, my sadness and underlying anger.
From the United States I brought a Nikon D5600, with which I began to portray these “dramatic” everyday scenarios: nooks and crannies in the house, my mother as a nurse, my grandmother’s face where her firm and hard gestures were becoming soft and hazy. We were three Spartans with mental armor deteriorating, leaving the softest of our emotions on the surface.
At the beginning, the camera functioned to distance myself from my context, a “distant photographer” who recorded situations. There are no records of these photos because I deleted them, my intention was never to show them but to be able to deal with what I experienced.
This first distance later allowed me to get closer, becoming a “peer photographer” who portrayed existences (entities). Now I was interested in portraying the first person of the existence that I had next to me, giving space to his beauty, his form, his story “How do you live life?” My gaze is with questions and the answers I seek are not usually with signifiers.
What began as an intra-familial survival strategy mutated into an extra-familial and global artistic project. I worked as a therapist for many years and there I discovered my fascination with life stories, simultaneously opposite truths that come together in the common story of “Life.” I portray entities (existences not only human) seeking to capture something of their life story.
Returning to Neuquén allowed me to connect with “what matters to me” about existence and that is how I was able to start photographing, what I see matters to me. I come to fall in fraternal love with those whom I portray, something about them calls me and I feel it in the form of love. Photography becomes a spiritual practice, feeling in communion with -it dios-.
Mariangela Mussatti
*I use the expression “it”, a personal pronoun for subjects and objects, in a way that transcends the personalized constituting a more deeply relational potency.
**The photos I selected to show start from the year 2024.