Prove di libertà: Portray Actors during Lockdown according to Riccardo Ghilardi’s Work

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has overwhelmed us in such a sudden and drastic way that it has rewritten our habits, including the experience of our domestic spaces. Starting from the role of the pandemic in redefinition of the interaction between public and private, internal and external spaces that founds the idea of ​​domesticity, we want to analyze Riccardo Ghilardi’s project Prove di libertà. This work collects shots taken by the Roman photographer during the lockdown of Spring 2020. The project draws a path that connects different portraits of cinema personalities with portraits of ordinary people, alternating them with photographs of empty streets and cinemas. The dialogue between the images tells the story of the cross-shared experience in which everyone, known or not, feels to be united by the same desire to return to freedom. In particular, the domestic space emerges as perfect scenario of this shared story, because the house had become at that moment, for everyone, the forced and unique space of the existential experience. The domestic space is also important because - with the pandemic - we acquired a habit which never was so pervasive before: going to other people’s home through images.