Premio Combat Prize

LA ISLA
Critical Review by Anna Viola Sborgi
The island has always been an archetypal site in visual and literary culture, a place in which man is free to give life to new utopias of regeneration. The island resonates with Shakespearean echoes: we get to it as new Prosperos pursuing a better version of the world we come from, hoping to recover a lost purity in the relationship between man and nature.
As he re-creates the world from scratch, however, man often loses control of nature itself.
Marco Ferraris’s La Isla is a project in progress, expanding from photography to video, from the dialogue between texts and images, to performance in a wider sense.Ferraris thus gives birth to a multimedia, complex artwork, acting as a sort of travel journal of his artistic research.He keeps coming back to it, enriching it with new insights, time after time.
After all, even though the island is certainly a place of stasis, waves break on its shores from all sides. It is, furthermore, a place you can come back to after each journey, bringing something new back with you, each time. The photographic images in this series are structured in an extremely balanced way: they express a sense of stasis. Despite the natural setting, the mise-en-scene prevails, expressing a tension between spontaneity and artificiality.
Ferraris has been meditating on these aspects for a long time and has worked on them in Realfiction and in his Passaggi di Tempo, where passers-by are reproduced as clones in their movements and are called to interpret new versions of themselves.
A tension between movement and stasis is the organizing principle of some of the sets, as, for example, La Mujer Artemisia and Anemoi. Although the female body is positioned at the centre, still and frozen by the camera, reminding other, more static images of La Isla, it seems to be about to expand outside the frame at the same time.
Perhaps because of the variety of visual references, the shots of La Isla are really heterogeneous, aesthetically.
In Mitos Submarinos, Marco Ferraris expands the sphere of elements to water, where new gods, belonging to different religions, meet. They carry on their search of origins, coming back to a sort of primordial amniotic fluid.
The island represents an open space we visit to find new meanings each time. Although we are aware – as Prospero is on his own island - that recreating an uncontaminated microcosm, away from the troubles of the world we come from, is often an illusion, we know that, as Borges writes in his Fragments from an Apocryphal Gospel (used as a comment on the images),“ Nothing is built on stone, everything on sand, but our duty is to build as if sand were stone (41)”.
Born in 1978 in Genova, Italy.
Visual artist in the fields of photography and film making which he has always done as a passion and as a pursuit of knowledge with a deep interest in documentary projects.
After graduating in psychology in 2005 writing a thesis on visual perception he begins working on reportage and portrait.
His latest project ”La Isla” combines photography and video in an ongoing five part photography work that are to become books and an experimental short film finished in 2015.
Seventy performers participated, from eighteen different countries and a vast variety of professions.
His work is being exposed in Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, Russia, Holland, Mozambique and USA.
He is currently based in Ibiza, Spain, working in Europe and Asia.
He is always looking for new projects and collaborations in the creative field.