days have no numbers
I rented a little house in the woods for a month with two of my friends.
Over the course of the past year, inspiration was starting to wear thin. The project I had planned, a final goodbye to my neighbourhood before hypothetically moving into the city, was dashed by mask-wearing mandates and a year that felt too out of the loop to actually sum up what every summer felt like. Consistency, the one thing I was holding on to for this project, wasn’t an option. Moving to the city to be closer to school felt pointless if school was going to be over the internet anyways. With nothing to lose, Jen, Patrick and I decided that it would be nice to leave the city for a while. Work on some projects, focus on school, get off Twitter and maybe have some friends come visit while surrounded by nature, it all sounded very nice.
While Jen and Patrick spent most of their time working on their respective crafts in their rooms, I had an entire basement to myself. I brought my Hasselblad and my guitar, hoping that either of those two mediums could provide a new kind of inspiration while I wasn’t busy with school.
Oddly enough, it was school itself that inspired the rest of my stay in the cabin. In one of my classes, we were instructed to take five minutes and free write. Just write down anything that you’re thinking about. This is what I came up with:
As a photographer, I genuinely tend to play it safe. Well, not “safe”, but I’m aware of what I like and what I find appealing, and it’s what my work translates into. But what about everything outside my blinders? I find myself often running out of ideas and themes for photo series and creative ventures, not because these themes don’t exist, but because they fall outside the category of what is considered “me” and the identity I have created for myself as an artist and a person. Without these defining characteristics and concepts and niches, would I still be Matteo? I mean, yes, I would still be the physical version of myself, but would I be the concept of “Matteo the artist” that I’ve built for myself and presented myself as over the last few years?
The fear of “selling out” seems to be a real threat to authenticity and the artistic process. Sharing art and building an audience feels like a double-edged sword. On one end, it’s nice to feel appreciated. It’s nice to know that people connect with your work and that they believe in what you do. Where it starts to become a problem is when you start to push your work into a certain direction because it’s what other people want to see, or even worse, because it's what you think other people want to see.
The idea that eventually, every artist unknowingly reaches a peak, is a terrifying concept. From a distance, it seems like the only possible outcomes are to go out with a bang or fade into obscurity. Yes, you can think of every different project and experimentation as a fresh start, with a constant need to surpass everything you’ve done before, or you can see it as an amalgamation of everything you’ve accomplished. You’re allowed to look at past work and say “I like that and I’m proud of it, but I don’t want to do that again. I’m going to try something different”.
This series is one of the many “middles” I'll likely produce over the course of the next few years. Not really starting out, not reaching the end yet. Just a reflection of where I am right now. The 28 days I spent in the cabin melted into each other, but in a wider sense, so has everything else. Looking back, I can’t remember the order that most pivotal life events have really happened in. Time gets tangled up to the point where there’s no use in trying to pull it apart. The only real thing I can do is document the present while I'm there.
