LIQUID SUBURBS

Through this photographic portfolio entitled “LIQUID SUBURBS” we want to focus on the theme of suburbs understood as both physical spaces and metaphorical dimensions. In the peripheries, in modern times, we have associated in negative terms what Bauman defines as “forced individualism”, as the liberation from any possible social bond and consequent solitary management of “risk”, uncertainty and the fears that derive from it. In a “liquid” society, life, particularly in the suburbs, seems to settle down and flatten itself in an eternal arid present of future prospects, similar to quicksand, amidst increasingly heavy and immobilizing doubts and perplexities, anchored to certainties linked to a past that is not it exists more and instead persists with nostalgia in the memories of flexible men, weakening them transformative capacity of reality. To adapt to continuous change and the structural risks of the second modernity, man has preferred to abandon the thought of introspection by adopting a mentality of “survival” that feeds on a “fast” thought typical of machines. A thought that does not allow for any deep reflection of one’s own experiences, which does not provide the possibility of authentically taking care of one’s self and which is shown through the construction, reflected by the architecture of the suburbs (as highlighted in the portfolio), of a “patchwork” Composed of many small and fragile fragments, often devoid of ties and connections, which are unable to give meaning and significance to the existential path of the individual as well as of the family nucleus and consequently of the non-community itself.