About This Project

Emanuele Moi

Suspended Animation

This image is part of my project “Wunderkammer” (from the German word for “chamber of curiosities”). 

The project emerges from my studies in visual culture, aesthetics, and semantics, it explores the modalities in which symbolism is employed as a code to layer images with different meanings.

Symbols works on archetypical, cultural, and personal levels, their interpretation is, therefore, dependent on the familiarity of the viewer with the language they have been encoded into. Furthermore, the same symbols have been taken, used, and twisted while being handed down from artist to artist for centuries, making their interpretation progressively more ambiguous.
The project is compiled as a curated collection of personal icons and mythologies playing with this ambiguity.
It explores and makes use of the modalities in which objects are elevated to symbols transcending their mundane significance.
The forms and style of still life are employed to construct representations that attest to the status of these images as carriers of “occult” meanings.

At the same time, these images are a play on aesthetics and the fetishism of images and within the images, touching big themes such as death, life and beauty, and let truth, belief, and fiction merge into one. The specific significance of the images is left ambiguous as an invitation for the viewer to read freely into them, to project their own cultural awareness and personal sensitivity onto the work in order to extract their own interpretation. Misinterpretation is therefore encouraged as the prelude to personal understanding.

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