Susanna Pozzoli joins Nature Humaine nonprofit artist-in-residence in Le Blanc (Centre region, France) in 2012. She lives and works in Le Blanc in August - October 2012 and early winter 2013. Her project composed of interviews and photographs, creates a choral view of this area where people live spread in a vast rural territory. She makes a public call, asking residents to bring he to their secret places. The final show presenting her project and the related publication is presented in May 2013.

In “Dreaming with open eyes” (Italian expression for daydreaming) Susanna delivers an intimate portrait of the inhabitants of the Brenne. Their “secret gardens” are evoked in photographic portraits and interviews. People of different ages and lifestyles shared with her their beloved places in the region. The results give us an unexpected rediscovery of our vast territory.
Going against her attraction to capitals and urban centers, in the continuity with her earlier works focused on identity and territory, Susanna Pozzoli proposes us to think about the places we love in every day life, locations that we hold dear, places of dreams and memories, which reveal our feelings of belonging to a specific environment and community. Responding to a call for participation widely distributed, the people photographed shared with her their favorite places, which are all different: some are full of personal history, others witnessed a shared experience in the community, gone forever; some are small corners ideal to observe nature, starting daydreaming or falling into nostalgia. Through the camera, Susanna was invited to discover these personal places. She went there alone with the participants and tried to follow the point of view and the emotions of the person who took her there. The audio interviews, presented within the photographs in the exhibition, help the viewer to understand the interest of those places. In this way, Susanna invites us to make room for our own imagination in order to fancy what we do not see in the photographs: portraits and landscapes within the words create all together an imaginary walk through the personal “magic places”, a real work on the inner projections.
Philippe Pavageau, Nature Humaine’s Director

Nelle parole c'è qualcosa d'impudico¹ (There is something indecent in words)

Please, listen to the INTERVIEWS

1. Cesare Pavese, La casa in collina, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino 1949