Alessia Cocca was born in Benevento (Italy) in 1982 and now lives in Berlin. She uses all the photo possibilities to explore big and small issues of our inner world. Enjoy the reading of her answers to a few questions.And don’t miss her solo show in Berlin: Absence / Mancanze opens 09. Feb. 2013 and will run ’till 23. Feb. 2013 at Kunstraum Tapir.
Full interview and preview images after the cut.
[All images and self portrait copyright by Alessia Cocca]
Where do you come from and where will you go?
I come from Italy and I will go towards everyone, everyplace and everything that is waiting for me, I don’t know where.
Regarding your art, photos that look like paintings or vice versa?
The photography shows the paintings in my mind to other people. The photography expresses my pictorial sense and rationalize it.
There are a lot of symbols in your images, can you explain what your world is made of?
I’m a nostalgic and my world is built on this nostalgia. I grew up between the old objects that my grandfather has collected. The symbols that I use are strongly linked to my childhood. I always believed that every object has a long story to tell us. Furthermore I studied in Napoli and I loved the strong sense of Vanitas that is everywhere in this city; the fascination of the symbols on the dark paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries has impressed and affected me.
Often you start a project taking inspiration from reality (the Berlin wall, the Alfredino’s tragic story..), how do you link or mix imagination with reality?
I often take inspiration from reality, because I like to find the poetic sense of what happens. To forget is easy and the art can help us to not lose the significance of the events. I use imagination to understand the reality, even if it’s not always possible.
What about your new exhibition?
My next exhibition in Berlin “Absence/Mancanze” will focus on the theme of presences, of the phantoms and the feelings that we feel but we cannot touch. Misted portraits of people we met, or that we just we imagined, or we don’t remember. I was inspired by marginalized female figures, real people considered like shadows by society (witches, mad, the traditional japanese ghosts yūrei). The images aren’t into focus, because the stories of these people are clouded. I worked with the color, the force and the prominent beauty of the bodies. These new works were made in Studio and the use of digital is really reduced to the minimum.
What are the weirdest things you dream?
I dream often and I usually use them for my works. Several times I dream markets full of old objects. Once when I was a child I dreamt wonderful pyrotechnic fires on the waterfor the end of the world meanwhile a silent fox-god was sitting on a roof (this image is present in my work It was raining).
