On view till 28 December 2024
Tue to Fri 2-5.30, Sat 10-12.30, 2-5.30
Guided visit on Saturday at 10.30
As he does every year at the end of December, Marco Saroldi is getting ready to send his 38th greeting card to a circle of family, friends and acquaintances who eagerly await each new creation and collect them with fervour.
It all began as a game almost 40 years ago. A young photographer from Turin, bored with the idea of having to call family and friends for the never-ending chore of New Year’s greetings, decided to take a photo of himself with his girlfriend and send it as a greeting card.
It would be the first self-portrait in a series that would span his entire life, different eras and even continents, since after 2015, when Marco moved to Auroville, the wishes would travel from India to the West and not the other way round anymore.
The game of self-portraiture is gradually becoming less self-referential and more sophisticated. Marco developed a passion for this
pastime, which over time turned into a real project.
The figure of the photographer becomes a mirror of time, a punching bag, an identikit for the traveller of our time, which he stages with aplomb, humour and ferocity.
Nothing can escape his merciless gaze, from our technological and consumerist manias to the socio-political blunders of our governments, from ecological concerns to the catastrophic and ridiculous triumph of human individualism, from cloning to the mafia.
He hijacks religious and advertising icons – Nike, Che Guevara, Botticelli, United Colors of Benetton – to create his own personal theatre, sometimes featuring his own family and friends.
A magic lantern in the beam of which Marco Saroldi’s self-portraits scroll past, projections of us, his contemporaries, captured in our ironic and slightly desperate essence.
