About This Project

Giorgia Valli

AVES MEI

I.
Dozing beneath the veil of Maya, we proceed to an imaginary reality in a prison of the mind. These cages of winged creatures, whose walls have been painted by a man with their respective natural habitats, are an attempt to create a fictitious reality that can deceive the prisoner into believing he or she lives in a true yet intangible world.
II.
… After a period spent in the midst of thousands of sounds, my wish was to photograph silence. Wandering, I reached the Bronx Zoo, free to move about and photograph for hours. I noticed a sense of freedom that made me feel serene, in a dimension suspended between earth and the heavens. My only connection to reality was through sounds, simple, primitive. Not unlike the cries with which people and birds make their way into the world, with nothing more than simple syllables, such as “da-da” or “ma-ma.” Shot after shot, the singsong of baby talk reached my ears. Whether in suffering or liberty, the mysterious song of birds leaves an indelible trace, which, like cages set into a wall, will eternally preserve the lives and voices of those who inhabited them.
III.
Each photograph was taken in a section of the Bronx Zoo in New York City called ‘The World of Birds’.  Every photo represents a bird’s cage. The idea was then to associate these cages with the different places I used to live around the world. The titles of the photograph were created by extrapolating the vowels of the address of each home where I have lived, from birth to the present; these vowels represent that which has remained of each house as if they were memories. All these places have been to me sometimes like nests and sometimes like cages. There my ideas ‘grew up’ and my thoughts have been freer or less free, depending on the different characteristics of those places. This project is meant to be an expression of repressed feelings of freedom – such as the ones birds experience in their cages.

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