THE GOLDENHORNED DEER
2023
The Goldenhorned Deer began as a research on the stratification in medieval or medieval-related architecture, paintings and sites. During this research, I came across the figure of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths who, at the encouragement and direction of the Roman emperor Zeno, invaded Italy, deposed King Odoacer and ruled a kingdom of Romans and Goths from 493 to 526.
While living in Cesena, I discovered that the monolithic dome of Theodoric’s Mausoleum in Ravenna was made of Aurisina marble. This made me think of the daily journeys between Udine and Trieste made for months by train, from which I could clearly see some of the quarries where the material had probably been extracted, and that had always attracted me. This, in turn, made me think about travel as experience and the voyages of the arts through time and space. A forest, a statue, a book, monumental tombs, a girl, a painting, an avalanche.
From an excessively historical-technical project, I freed myself, following like a largely inaccurate compass the real and legendary events of Theodoric. By relating elements that are distant from each other, both in terms of the type of subject and the physical distance between them, I sought, rather than the stratification within medieval works, to understand something more about photography and my own photographic practice, as well as to reason about a photograph that represents and reflects on works of art and objects, on the institutions or places in which they are placed, on architecture, landscapes, people.
The Goldenhorned Deer is a 60 page book printed on matt coated paper, staple bound and inserted in a 2mm thick grey cardboard slipcover, 19.5x25cm format for the interior and 20x25cm for the slipcover.
Final project for the Master in Photography of the IUAV University, Venice.
Supervised by
Stefano Graziani