#hillyer

What challenges did you face in creating a long-term project that spanned over four years?

The main challenges I experienced while undertaking this long-term project was selecting an edit because of the large archive I had accumulated. I was shooting constantly on whatever camera I happened to have at hand at the time, so I was producing hundreds of images a month. All of these certainly didn’t make the cut, but it made for a glut of imagery to process.

The other most challenging part of doing this type of long-term work was dealing with repetition. Much of the imagery produced was taken at my parent’s home over the years, so there was a lot of recurring locations, rooms, and people. The variables were the poses, events, light, distance from the camera, and gestures. There were so many beautiful moments that were similar over the years that made for some tough editing decisions.

Did you find there was an opposition or dichotomy between, as you state, “the immediacy of the need to capture the moment as it unfolded” and the long-term nature of the work?

I think these things went hand-in-hand. The immediacy of the work stemmed from using the camera to capture an event as it occurred or a fleeting moment or feeling. I found that even when I wasn’t in the hospital room, or with a grieving family member, the weight of loss was upon me and tinting how I viewed my everyday experiences. I decided to photograph whatever triggered those feelings.

This allowed me to feel like I was doing something instead of idly standing by. I would review my image choices weekly/monthly and it became clear that this was a space for me to dwell in and process the experience. Because I was not interested in reporting events as they happened, but rather capturing fleeting feelings to convey the overall arc of grief, this became a long-term project with no distinct narrative.

Was it difficult to embody the role of voyeur within your own family? Did you feel removed or closer to them by capturing them through your lens?

I am the youngest of four children and have always been an observer of my family. As a child I would tuck myself into the corner of a room and just watch everyone around me. As I got into photography in my teens it felt only natural to continue this type of observation of those I was closest to, but this time through the lens. I have made work about my parents for various projects while pursuing my BFA, including my thesis work 20161, so they were accustomed to me following them with a camera. It never occurred to me to not document my family during this time. Although we were all grieving this loss in our own ways independently, we were also bound together by it.

During the actual act of photographing I was aware that I was using my camera as a barrier to acknowledging the reality of the situation and graveness of emotion. This was both a coping mechanism and a reflexive instinct. I’ve always believed art should be personal and authentic, and photographing these difficult times allowed me to process through a visual, emotive diary while also bringing me closer to my family by actively seeing and realizing their experiences.

How did you find beauty in painful and deeply personal topics?

I believe that there is beauty in the mundane. There is a captivating moment to be had in any scenario if you’re open to seeing it. I’ve trained myself to look for these scenes—magical light, a brief gesture, a small detail – that goes beyond recording reality to relaying an experience.

I follow this same mode of photographing when dealing with deeply personal or painful experiences. I harness the intensity of a feeling and distill it into a visually captivating and emotionally poignant image. The rawness and closeness push me to create images that are fiercely personal to me but convey an atmosphere that the viewer can also identify and empathize with.

What is next for you, will you continue working on this same series or are you embarking onto a new project?

I will always continue to photograph my family but am putting a period on Disenchanted. My goals are to take my final edit of 50+ images I have for this body of work and create a book within the next year. I am currently working on a new body of work which will be shown at the Hamiltonian gallery in April 2019.

Andrea is an artist and city planner born in Rome, Italy and based in Silver Spring, MD, just outside Washington, DC. Andrea’s work explores issues of migration and identity, the fleeting concepts of home and safety, nationalistic narratives, and gun violence in the US. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the DC metropolitan region including IA&A at Hillyer, Touchstone Gallery, the Annapolis Maritime Museum, and the Arlington Art Center. His paintings have been featured in publications in the US, UK, and Italy. Andrea is a Board Member of the non-profit art advocacy Washington Project for the Arts. 

http://www.andrealimauro.com/

Your work engages with the fleeting idea of home and safety in our world. How do you, as someone who has lived in many countries, define home?

My life experience is central to my understanding of “home.” My first experience with migration started early when I was 11 and my family moved to Belgium.  I was in middle school – a terrible age for anything, let alone moving to a country where you do not speak the language. In Belgium I was faced with intense discrimination by some teachers. The south of Belgium had experienced mass migration from Italy a few decades earlier and anti-Italian sentiment was still very strong among some people when we arrived there in the 1980′s. I had a physics professor who would call me names - like dirty or stinky Italian - in front of my Belgian classmates and kick me out of the class for no apparent reason other than my background. My parents did not speak French, so I often helped them with grocery shopping and communication in public. I remember this one time when my mom sent me to a bakery while she and my father waited outside in their car. When I was inside the owner refused to sell me bread because of my accent. I was very upset and could not believe someone would act like that towards a child. When I went back to the car I told my parents that there was no bread left, rather than let them know about the episode for fear that my father would confront the baker.  My experience in Belgium was very formative for the way I came to understand identity and discrimination. The cruel irony is that when we finally moved back to Italy we relocated to the north of the country where my southern Italian accent often got me singled out or excluded in high school and sports, teaching me yet another lesson about home and identity. I think that was the turning point for me was where I came to conclude that “home” for me would be a fluid concept, or something I had and could build in a place of my choice. It was kind of liberating and since then I have lived over half of my life outside my native country, and in half a dozen countries on three continents. Today, home is where I have my deepest sentimental relationships: Verona and Washington, DC.

Tell us about the inspiration and evolution of this series. What discussions do you hope for Mare Nostrvm to evoke?

Politically, the inspiration for “Mare Nostrvm” started as a reaction to all my current and past “homes” being affected by the global populist movement. It started with Brexit which affected me deeply as it would preclude me today, or my children in the future, to have the same wonderful experience I had in the 1990′s when I lived in England as a student. After that, Trump’s electoral victory on an anti-immigrant wave made me feel very unsafe in the US and forced my wife and I to have serious conversations about relocating. The final straw was the election of a right-wing populist government in Italy fueled mostly by anti-immigrant sentiments.

Artistically, while the political world around me seemed to go crazy, I could not stop thinking about the powerful images of women, children, and men packed on rickety boats trying to get to Italy. I was inspired by their bravery and desperation, leading them to make such a dangerous trip (the deadliest migration route in the world). I felt I wanted to do something about their humanity which often gets lost when right-wing politicians talk about them only focusing on the economic cost of hosting them, or worse, talk about them as being dangerous invaders. The geographic route of their migration and the language politicians use to describe it brought up a lot of parallels with Roman and Italian history.  I started researching in more depth the Punic Wars and Italian colonial history to find inspiration for my series. I really started seeing everything as part of this 2000 years of history that links Italy with north Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean. Italy is very much the product of cyclical exchanges with our neighbors on the sea as much as our European neighbors to the north.

Your color palettes and materials are bright, and elicit a sense of happiness at first viewing—there are vibrant hues and a shimmering use of gold—can you tell us more about your use of color, especially in depicting such difficult topics?

I like to make art that is aesthetically pleasing, and the sea is my element. I love how beautiful the Mediterranean is, but also how it can make you feel small and how you must respect its power. I needed to make the sea beautiful and menacing at the same time. Therefore, the color choices are very intentional. The sea in all its depth is dark and grey whereas only its visible top layer shines with enticing and deceiving colors. I also wanted to use colors that connected the series to the story and aesthetics of ancient Rome. From the patterns of cobblestone streets, to the gold leaves, to the reds and greens of Romano frescoes, it all comes back to my youth growing up in the “Eternal City.”

What do you feel will be the next step for this series of work?