Created by the will of an Italian artist, Sitri is an artistic project working on nakedness, physical expressivity and body plasticity. Its portraits of a contemporary Odalisque is a magnificent résumé of her art.
Who are you? Would you introduce yourself for our readers?
Sitri is the name chosen for my artistic project since 2015. It refers to an artistic journey originated by the need to evolve my photographic path I was following. I felt the urge to give an ultimate form to the words I was writing, to evoke an peculiar imagery in the pictures connected with my artistic needs, instead of customer’s ones. Upon these premises, I built an aesthetic research shaped by my most genuine needs. They let myself artistically grow further and thrive.
From your perspective, would you say that photography is art? In addition, would you consider yourself more as an artist or as a photographer?
Photography can be regarded as art when the same people who perform it consider it as an artistic activity. Here, one has to employ both symbols and meanings; moreover, one also has to give space to an idea and give breath to the narrative. Merely taking a shoot does not make photography an art – and the same can be said about painting or sculpturing, even if it is easier to assume the latter ones as artistic activities. At every level, art requires an urge, a research and a path, but especially the time.
When did you start taking artistic pictures? Do you also resort to other artistic media, or do you prefer focusing yourself on just photography?
My works became artistic in time, because it has been the time that made me understand my needs and my expressive skills. No matter how much talent one have; one also needs a mental and moral depth to give birth to something that is the actual product of one’s own knowledge and experience. Among different media, today the one I prefer is photography: the more I let this medium lead me, the more it allows me to discover its limitless potentialities. It is an incessant discovering and devising new solutions to get what I have in my mind.
I also admit that various interests and genuine curiosity push me toward the other media: for example, photography cannot forget printing, as well as photography direction in movies is another crucial aspect to engage with. Likewise, installation and setting up are necessary for an exhibition. Let’s say, the heart chooses the means, but necessities make one know all the alternative expressive solutions.
Where did you get your artistic inspiration? Have you been influenced by Italian or foreign sources you could mention?
Every possible reality worked as a source of inspiration for my path: cartoons, books, paintings, sculptures, music, cinema, etc. Everything I looked has been a significant push for the works I create. Definitely, everything is inspirational and it could not be otherwise.
Of course, there are things deeper touching our emotional strings, according to what we had experienced in our past. Coming straight to the point, Caravaggio, Hieronymus Bosch, Paolo Roversi, Tim Walker, Alex Kuno and manga can be assumed as explicit influences. Especially about manga, I cannot speak of just one of them since each of them is such a vast world that every panel can give a limitless inspiration.
In the pictures you create, the body is clearly put at the service of photography. Are there specific reasons – maybe connected with contemporary feminist issues – that pushed you in this direction?
My works are an invitation to the contemplation of body, temple of human being, object and altar of life itself. Everything comes into being from the body and then dies in it. It is Matter becoming expression of non-human, similar still not assimilable, put in a set belonging to it without connoting it, being a whole with everything around existing and then vanishing. In these works, the perception of humanness is posing the question if what one beholds is actually a living creature instead of a sculpture – a sculpture put there to remind the wonder of the creation of the Nature, a static nature, seemingly inert yet filled with life and power. There is a redundancy of bodies and distortions leading us inside a whirlwind succession of images, of paintings giving birth to considerations beyond what is showed, suggesting introspective questions, which are conceptual and related to the sense of wonder.
The backgrounds of your pictures constantly change. Sometimes they are gloomy, sometimes indistinct, and sometimes aseptic. They surely contribute to strengthen the artistic effectiveness of your pictures. Is it you who prepares the setting within which you take pictures of your subjects, or do you employ already made setting ups?
I often shoot pictures of people in their own houses; that allows me to change setting easily. But, it is not just a passive choice since – once entered in a house – I always look for the best setting to express what the subject and the house itself communicate to me. It could also happen that I modify the setting of the room to some extent. Other times, instead, it happens to me to have the urge to search for a specific sensation connected with a project. In that case, starting from zero, we engaged ourselves to bring to life a setting or a scenography such that it can transmit the message lying behind the idea at its best.
In your "De-forma series", images are blurred, the contours are vague, and bodies are disposed in a plastic way. What message did you want to transmit, or what artistic intention did you want to satisfy?
Destructuring the human shape in order to be able to recognize our own features torn apart by the existence of someone else in the picture. Someone else who does not offer us further solitude again, but the hope that one could find eyes and soul again in those deformations. A human shape free from constraints, expression of the turmoil of vital emotions stirring inside us.
In your "Odalisca" series, the human body takes the shape of Odalisque. What were your intentions?
In the aesthetic research of the image of Odalisque, there is a direct reference to the exotic/European imagination. Through it, I wanted to stress and highlight the most oneiric and romantic aspect. There, both the optical and the chromatic distortions are employed to lead the beholder in a world where well-known physical laws are redesigned by the essence of Odalisque itself.
Here, the Odalisque is a creature seen as a character merging dream and reality. She overwhelms all our senses through her dance and, indeed, she becomes a deity ruling that exact moment and the fate of all her spectators during her performance.
Here, the Odalisque is no longer a slave, but she is instead a free enchantress, manifestation of her our ambitions through her own power.