The installation at the Galleria Civica di Modena for Area Progetto combined new oil and acrylic paintings, drawings, found photographs, vintage magazines, furniture, candies, and other objects to recreate a stylized idea of a bourgeois living room - a space to receive guests and manifest one's social status. It was developed from photographic material found at a Roman flea market, suggesting an imaginary story centered around the woman who appears in nearly all the photographs. The story reflects her aspirations for social elevation, the economic well-being gained through an important marriage, and the desire to capture material prestige through a stereotyped iconography that evokes the sometimes naïve, cinematic imagery of postwar Europe in the 1950s-60s. More broadly, it addresses the universal drive, including contemporary ones, for social and formal affirmation through documentation that ceases to be a real testimony of lived experience and instead becomes a form of self-representation, an involuntary vehicle of the culture of an era.
