Journey to Armenia
The starting point, from which the work borrows its title, is the Russian writer Osip Mandel’stam’s trip to Armenia in 1930. Silvia Camporesi has retraced the tracks of that journey in search of the holy places, atmospheres and landscapes that had so much fascinated Mandel’stam. Armenia, the kingdom of screaming stones, becomes thus a place of photographic and cultural exploration, unveiling landscapes and images of churches and monasteries with typical architectures, rising impervious, perfectly aligned to the profiles of the surrounding mountains and so preciously embellished with stone crosses (khatchkar).
The artist intervenes on all the pictures of the project by changing - adding or subtracting elements, mutating the proportions of both subject and background - in order to detach these places from reality, suspend and poise them between illusion and reality.
