BOOKS
FEAR OF MIRRORS
Fear of Mirrors by Alba Zari is an investigation into self-representation in the digital age. From the mirror to the screen, the project explores how the digital revolution has transformed the way we communicate with ourselves, placing the female image at the center and examining the social conditioning that shapes it.
Through a blend of photography, research, and experimentation, Zari analyzes the patriarchal dynamics that influence self-representation, questioning whether new technologies have truly liberated female identity or merely redefined old constraints in new forms.
The artist plays with the media, experiments on herself, and exposes the mechanisms of the web, confronting platforms and algorithms that perpetuate homogenizing aesthetic standards.
In Fear of Mirrors, Zari does not aim to provide solutions or answers but instead invites the viewer into an open reflection on contemporary society, where one question lingers in the digital void from which the project emerges: has the mirror finally shattered, or are we still prisoners of its reflection?
Words by Francesco Rombaldi
Curator: Francesco Rombaldi
Graphic Design: Joana Durães
Soft Cover
208 pages
23 x 17 cm
Printed by Grafiche Veneziane, Venezia
Print Run: 500 copies
Publishers: Yogurt Editions & XYZ Books
The Y
WITTY BOOKS160 Pages / 16.5 x 24 cm
Soft cover / 500 copies
Design by Studio Iknoki
Curated by Francesca Seravalle
Thanks to support of Collezione Donata Pizzi
Published in June 2019
Out of print
How deep is the sea
Luminous Phenomena
Vol. 4 ALBA ZARI
Testo in catalogo: Chiara Bardelli Nonino
Formato: 12x17 cm cartonato
Pagine: 96
Lingua: Inglese, italiano e francese
Tiratura: 200 copie numerate
ISBN 97888 6726 2564
«LIKE IF THEY WERE STORMY SEAS»
Chiara Bardelli Nonino
When Alba asked me to write a piece for this
project and I asked her what this was about, she
simply sent me two YouTube links: Crystal by the
Fleetwood Mac and How Deep is the Ocean by
Chet Baker. Then she added: it describes love
and relationships like if they were stormy seas.
The underwater photos are a recurrent topic in
the contemporary photographic world, and for
a simple fact: water, with its straight-forward
references to the ideas of life and rebirth, with
its allusion to the mother’s womb, has such an
eradicated symbology in our culture, that acts
effortlessly on the visual subconscious of each
of the viewers.
But there is nothing easy or calculated in Alba’s
photos. They do not come from a research of
common aesthetic satisfaction: they are part of a
very personal, spontaneous project, the natural
expression of an artist that divides her own
cultural identity between Trieste and Thailand,
and she is therefore used to border areas and to
transitions.
By looking at her pictures, I thought about the
concept used in astronomy to find a habitable
planet: the so-called “Goldilocks Zone”, that area
which is not too far and not too close to a star
where it is possible to find water at a liquid state
and so, potentially, life.
How Deep Is The Sea (this is the name that
Alba Zari gave to this photo series) is a sort of
Goldilocks Zone of relationships, a hypothetical
and abstract space in which relations - from the
stormiest to the calmest, from rough sea to flat
sea, if we want to continue using water metaphors
- can survive.
Outside this area, there is darkness, emptiness
and memory.
Alba uses the sea like a limbo in which shapes
fade out, the body language gets interrupted,
the familiar gestures evolve. In that space of
uncertainty, Alba enacts her liminal portraits,
by trying to capture something very close to the
essence of her connection to the photographed
person, in a continuous fluctuation where subject
and photographer are intertwined, and it looks
like they occasionally belong one another.
There’s a line in Crystal saying: “I turned around
and the water was closing all around like a
glove, / like the love that had finally, finally found
me”. In those images representing naked and
submerged bodies, Alba decides to lose control
and to let herself be completely wrapped in
feelings of that moment, at times stormy, at times
sweet, at times turbid, at times crystal-clear, at
times deep, at times light. Like love.