Camillo Pasquarelli: By looking at recent projects, I deal very much with social and cultural issues

Can you tell us a little bit about your inspirations? Which themes do you often work with?

I would say that I often find myself inspired by movies, books, music, conversations and my daily life in general. The spark can also come by chance, but from that moment I start doing a lot of research before starting to take pictures. Then, when I am actually on the field, I let my instinct take over immersing myself completely into the place or social environment that I am willing to investigate. I think that serendipity plays a crucial role at this stage.

I don’t really have specific topics triggering my attention more than others. In fact, I enjoy changing themes very often. But if I have to look at my latest projects, I would say I deal very much with social and cultural issues exploring in particular notions as identity, memory, perception and history.

How do you see your relationship with the medium? How do you use photography to express your art?

Despite photography is my very first love, recently my attention has been driven toward a wider meaning of “image”: that could mean second-hand photographs, moving images, documents, X-rays.

Collaborations and contaminations from different fields, arts and with different profiles is something that I feel very attracted to right now, in order to reach a more collaborative and interdisciplinary practice. But I preserve a unique inclination to the great power of ambiguity contained into photography when it engages the viewer in a very active relationship.

We have been facing a lot of challenges this year. How do you see this moment for art? Is it changing your practice?

It is definitely affecting my practice, especially regarding all the travel restrictions we are facing. I was preparing a trip to the United States in the spring to begin the work about Columbus just when the pandemic broke out.

But personally, I feel a further, and more problematic, issue emerging when I try to think and plan the projects I would like to work on shortly: creating images today means that it will be difficult to avoid the visual references of this pandemic, such as people with masks. What worries me most is to create a body of work that will always be included in the "covid period" box even if it doesn't address that issue at all.

What do you expect from this experience as a Futures talent?

Being part of the Future program is a great experience and I expect to discover interesting new bodies of work from the other artists selected having the precious opportunity to meet curators and publishers. For my experience, I can say that networking and having different feedbacks and advices from experts can be a crucial moment of growth for my career.