Dayana Sharon Marconi
Dayana Sharon Marconi is an Italian artist based in Rome. In 2012 she moved to London and then to China and subsequently worked and travelled across Asia, Europe and the USA creating photographic projects with the aim of exploring different cultures and embracing diversity. She achieved a BA in Intercultural Studies at the University of Trieste in Italy, and she is currently enrolled as MA Photography student at Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK.
In her work, she is interested in exploring the ways in which photography can be used as a tool for psychological and emotional research, investigating her inner world and the one of the portrayed individuals and viewers.
Her latest work “I can hear you now” is a two-year project which employs great variety of visual solutions and artistic choices: photography, moving images, sounds and score create a 360-degrees experience and viewers, following its Itinerary, can explore themselves while observing “the other”. Thanks to the collaboration with artists and different professionals, she made the project adaptable to a wider audience: the artistic experience is accompanied by scientific and historical interpretations and the visual research by an analytical approach.
In her “Sequences”, she photographically portrays the whole emotional path her sitters followed in front of her camera: the use of long-exposure allowed her to depict those moments of emotional liberation capturing with her lenses facial expressions and body movements at the same time, proving that individuality and diversity have an important role also in the way we suffer.
They are structured in contact sheets, because this format allowed her to present the whole sequence of decisive moments that, altogether, take to a climax and to a subsequent emotional reaction to that strong externalisation of negative feelings.
These images are accompanied by related “Confrontation sheets” which portray two different emotions screamed away by the same people portrayed in her “Sequences”, this because the reasons of our suffering are not given by a singular feeling, but by a combination of them. Identifying the sources of their malaise and focusing of them, her sitters have the chance to actually let them go. Inspired by the work done by Dr Paul Ekman, these images are also born to ask viewers to actively participate, avoiding a voyeuristic approach to her project. They are asked to identify those feeling, playing an active role in her project.
The project is born to respond to a personal need of the author. As a sufferer of Anxiety Disorders, in this project she is particularly interested in the impact of Mental Health problems on individuals. In her personal experience, she often feels the urge to scream out in pain but this inner pressure is never expressed since our lives are managed by social norms that stigmatise these kind of behaviours, considering them as disturbing or deviate. She tried to transform the act of screaming, commonly considered as disruptive, in a constructive action that allows her sitters to release their negative emotions or trauma-related memories, creating a constructive dialogue around those Mental Health issues that are still considered a taboo in our culture.
Since the starting point of her research through images was the inability of expressing her malaise, into her project she included a section titled “Twelve episodes”. The word “episode”, is commonly related to Mental Health Disorders to describe a circumscribed period of time in which someone is affected by a specified illness. The title of this section, as the number of the images it is made up of, have its origin in the duration of one of her panic attacks, that has lasted for twelve hours, and these self-portraits depict the photographer after those long periods of suffering. In most cases she can’t autonomously manage her camera, so she started collaborating with her companion. She maintained the full control of the photographic process but, thanks to this collaboration, she had the chance to show his perspective, too: what he sees in those moments, portraying her frailty and exposing, at the same time, an intimate relationship through a visual dialogue.
Collaborating with the Italian videomaker Alessio Mattia and the Los Angeles based film composer Elena Maro, she also created a short documentary, “[ɪˈmaː.ɡoː]”, in which, with an experimental approach, she wanted to generate a dream-like journey into her mind and her soul, depicting how she perceives, or misperceives, herself, how she sees her past and the world. “[ɪˈmaː.ɡoː]” or “Imāgō” is a Latin world with multiple meanings, like image, representation, ghost, echo, thought, dream or ancestral image and this is exactly its purpose: a representation of its author reliving her traumas and memories to liberate herself from a burden and to close a circle. Connecting this documentary to the idea of a shared condition in suffering, she created a doppelgänger, another woman sharing her experiences in a different way, underlining her idea of individuality and self-affirmation. Her visual experiments and her narration are accompanied by interviews released by the music composer Elena Maro and the phychologist and neuropsychologist Dr Martina Gerbi.
“I can hear you now” project has been exhibited in May 2018 during “Art in Mind” at The Brick Lane Gallery Annexe, in London, UK; in June 2018 at FuoriLuogo Art and Culture Residence, in Asti, Italy and on July 7th 2018 during the art show “I am here – Here I am”, created in collaboration with the photographer Maryann Morris, the filmmaker Will Wright and the musicians Nathan Wacey and Ed Sykes, in Essex, UK.
“I can hear you now” project website: http://www.icanhearyounowproject.com/
“I can hear you now” project Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/icanhearyounow/
“I can hear you now” project on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IcanhearyounowDayanaMarconi/
Dayana Marconi Image website: http://www.dayanamarconiimage.com/
Dayana Marconi Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/dayanamarconi/
Dayana Marconi Image on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dayanamarconi.image
Dayana Marconi Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/dayanamarconi
Dayana Marconi profile on Stage 32: https://www.stage32.com/profile/656963
Dayana Marconi Twitter account: https://twitter.com/dayanam81
E-mail: dayanamarconiimage@gmail.com
