Diachronicles is an examination of the historical space, regarded as a fictional container where an apparent collection of evidences opens up to the fantastic. In this space, the attempt to reconstruct the past falls into phantasmal gaps, where things are generated, used, buried, unearthed, transported, and relocated.
This nomadic and fragmentary nature of what has been left behind, reveals how the movement, transfiguration, and misinterpretation of objects shape historiography and ultimately, the real.
In the impossible search of academic legitimation, the viewer is invited into a world where the factual and the fake overlap. The work addresses the leading role archaeology and the museum space play in a historical narrative, using the human body to suggest scale and as a means to display objects. Furthermore, Diachronicles digs into a parallel history, filled with poetic figures to encode, nonexistent artefacts and forgeries hidden in museums basements.
Giulia Parlato – graduated from the BA(Hons) Photography at London College of Communication in 2016 and from the MA Photography at the Royal College of Arts in 2019. Her practice focuses on staged photography, and revolves around history, myths, and object-hood. She studies the historical use of photography as a document of truth, specifically in its scientific and forensic uses, and attempts to challenge this language, by creating a new space in which fake histories take place. Looking at the fragility of historiography and at the idea of failed encounters, her practice undertakes an exhaustive journey into these notions in trying to understand which objects and spaces humankind usually use to search something that in reality can never be found. This melancholic and frustrating state, caused by humans’ impossibility to know the past, is what fascinates her, and it constitute the foundation of her work.
Her practice is influenced by the Arab-Norman Sicilian heritage and aesthetics and Aby Warburg’s studies on the history of art. Giulia’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been featured in printed and online publications including The British Journal of Photography, Artlicks, Source, Fisheye, Vogue Italia and Der Greif. In 2019 she was one of the recipients of the Paris Photo Carte Blanche Award and was selected for the Travers Smith CSR Art Programme. Her first solo show will open in 2020 at Palazzo Rasponi 2 in Ravenna as a winner of Camera Work. Giulia is currently in the process of expanding her latest project “Diachronicles” to work towards a book publication and has started researching for a new project.
