In central Sardinia, in several villages of Barbagia, strange and archaic traditions are well established. These ancient cults, practiced by the locals, represent an intense and brutal relationship between man and wild nature, with a cathartic and liberating purpose. These masks belong to a time that does not belong to us.
Masquerading is destiny, the bond of an uncanny relationship between the animal being and the divine. To wear means to metamorphose into the form of another entity. The threatening and disturbing effect of these masks is not to frighten the other, but to provoke a relationship with the other. Trees, boulders and logs seem to testify a remote time when man’s rituals put the individual in close connection with his animal and dark side of nature.
The people of this region, use the expression Animas to define something that has neither time nor body, that is both uncanny and wild, that is specifically nonhuman, and that is meant to bring about an experience.
Andrea Graziosi is an Italian photographer based in Marseille. Born in 1977, he grew up in a village in central Italy, one of the most visited spiritual and pilgrimage places in Italy.
Between the mid-90s and 2004 he brought his research and artistic experiences to the underground culture, getting involved in several collective projects dedicated to the diffusion of experimental arts. With his work he accomplishes his research around the correlations that the human being maintains with other forms of life. Evoking and working on ontological notions related to the concepts of animal becoming, parallel dimensions, fracture, strangeness, he aims to realize photographic works, in which the place of the printed object is decisive.
In 2015, he published his first book, Nunc Stans, with Éditions André Frère.
In 2022 and 2023, the ANIMAS project won the Polyptyque Award (France), the 3° Gomma Grant (UK), the Maison Blanche Award and the Honourable Mention at the Hariban Award in Kyoto (Japan).
Currently, he is working on new publishing projects.
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