The End of the Game | 2010
Man seeks nature, from immemorial time, he is part of it. It is a widespread need, made clear and indisputable. In the course of time he baited asymmetrical actions and rarely steadfast processes, sometimes conflicting. A short time ago my friend and photographer Gianpaolo Arena asked me to write a thought on a series of images realized in the Montello. It is an hilly area where in the past woods have supplied the raw materials to build the foundations of what remains one of the most extraordinary city in the world: Venice. These photographs portray some men disguised as armed fighters, busy to personify a kind of war game. After all, who as child didn’t dream to make war? Certainly costumes and arms were a lot less technological and sophisticated, but after all our outlook of the world as adults is not so far from those easy distinctions between cops and robbers, between good and wicked. The figures of Cain and Abel always divide history into halves. But as a matter of fact the affair is not so simple: there are no women, and the verisimilitude with the real soldiers masks something of disquieting. Is it again a question of a simulation? As people grow up the game becomes “free time”, it is not longer part of our jocose and innocuous way of living the day and the relationships with the others. It becomes marginal activity and loses the typical innocence and naturalness of the childish age. More than a power exhibition it is a question of the attempt to free repressed instincts and wishes, or even more, to give outlet to frustrations and disappointments. So nature is not only a background, but it becomes again the mother who embraces, a refuge where to camouflage. This photographic sequence shows us also the end of the game traditionally understood; that is the loss of naturalness. Not by chance the research of Gianpaolo Arena goes forward the theatre staged by the rambos of sundays, to portray basket grounds devoured by the grass and past games abandoned by the children “grown up”. Through this seesaw between present and past we can read the signs of a modern evolution of the game attitude. Less intuition, simplicity and imagination and more calculation, malice and imitation.
Caino e Abele Text by Steve Bisson
Originally published in the March 2011 issue of Camera Obscura