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EACH BOX IS A WISH  //  MARIA SILVANO

September 2014

 

Each Box is a Wish by Maria Silvano.

Location: Veniceinabottle, Castello 1794, 30122 Venice.

Wish
A desire or hope for something to happen.
Synonyms: desire, longing, hope, yearning, inclination, urge, whim, craving, hunger, thirst, lust.

 

Pinhole boxes. Visual impressions collected between Berlin and Venice. A glass bottle with the artist's wish.

 

Cookie boxes, candy cans, coffee jars, cigar cases. Found, stolen, bought and traded. Some of them have followed me all the way here from Venice, I found the others on the way. It takes a few tools and some magic to transform them into pinhole cameras. With these rudimental yet magical tools I try to record a parallel, more intimate world: the world of desires.

On the walls are forty small pinhole cameras in various containers either recovered from the street or from a more personal memory. Forty visual suggestions, wishes and dreams, from 40 different people, collected between Berlin and Venice. These micro works are precious treasures that enclose an image, blurred and confused. Changing and inaccurate, much like desires, which change depending on age, time, and people. 

 

The aim is to transform any media into a pinhole camera via a 'pinhole' hole (from the Greek stenos opaios, meaning 'tight hole'). The product of this particular technique is a simple, immediate and blurry photograph with an unlimited depth of field. The project becomes a social survey: What do we want today? Are my desires so distant and different from yours? Is the way I see the world unique and singular, or is it plural? Can this vision be shared?

 

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