LIQUID HETEROTOPY #1 – PERSONAL DESTINIES

The “PERSONAL DESTINIES” Photographic Portfolio is part of the “LIQUID HETEROTOPY” project, which was among the finalists at the PORTFOLIO SI-FEST 2019 international award (Italy). The research that led to the development of this portfolio draws its paradigmatic references from the homonymous book “Destini Personali” by the Philosopher Professor Remo Bodei published by Feltrinelli in 2002. The photographic journey aims to help us investigate the “statute of personal identity”, whose existence is proven by the subjective experience of unity and continuity of the ego in the course of time, which, however, immediately opens onto the abyss of necessity and the haemorrhage of meaning. Beyond the subjective experience, which immediately restores to each individual the certainty of being there and having a differentiated identity from all the others, the philosophical problem arises of understanding what personal identity is and how in fact it is realizes. This problem recognizes in man above all a social entity whose identity is defined in the name of its belonging to a transgenerational and contextual “We”. It is in the name of this “belonging” that each individual becomes aware of himself, reaches and lives his own unique and unrepeatable identity. This essentially means that it is society, with its apparatuses of coercion and persuasion, that provides the social molds from which individuation is defined, and this therefore depends to some extent on them. This “measure” is not predefined, it belongs to social history and varies over time. Having failed, for various reasons that we do not highlight, the religious references to the immortal soul that define individual identity as the immediate effect of divine creation and thereby remove it from the incidence of time and circumstances, the problem of identity arises. currently in terms of a contingent construction that oscillates between two extremes: the hypertrophy of “We”, which makes individual identity a simple appearance absorbed by social bonds and duties, denying it an autonomous and stable status, and hypertrophy of the “I” which, by exalting individual freedom in opposition to social ties, determines the withdrawal of the individual in the cult of himself and in the search for his own way of being which he must not be accountable to anyone.