Affective anthropomorphism
Irene Tondelli

Just like two train tracks, the words travel and research run parallel.
I think that when we leave, we do it because we are looking for something, newness, amazement, ourselves, memories… Although the scenarios may be new, we tend to seek for something, consciously or unconsciously, familiar to us within them, something reassuring.
A trip brings with it some expectations, like finding something that we won’t almost certainly find, or recovering something that has passed and which we will hardly be able to regain: an expectation that sometimes drowses in the torpor of nostalgia or sets behind the horizon of a breathtaking landscape.
I would call it affective anthropomorphism, and in the case of memories, a topography of memory. But it is this tension to research that makes us leave and leave again and that vanishes in front of waterfalls, glaciers, endless plains, to make room for the sense of amazement for Nature’s power. It is a sensation very close to the sense of infinity and that clashes with our human condition, our finiteness, but ends up to be comforting: it makes us feel part of something beyond our control, but to which we intrinsically belong.
It is this ambivalence between finite and infinite, fear and amazement, subjective and objective vision, details and wide shots that moves my photographic research of the last years.

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