Adrianna Glaviano: the safety of objects and the snake egg

There always seems to be something that doesn't add up in Adrianna Glaviano's photographs, and what doesn't add up amounts to exactly what matters: a gash ripping through order, predictability, an arrangement or symmetry. The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella, Lautremont would say. It is a question of shapes and volumes and semantics: a cluster of small houses next to buildings in which one of the two is out of proportion, a wall mosaic slashed to make it illegible, or pecten shells that appear out of place in a pocket, as if conjured up by a magician. It is a game of perspective and framing: the table is shot so that it looks disproportionate compared to the vase, the stairs distorted so that they lead nowhere but to an Escherian paradox. Purely unsettling dynamics: we look absent-mindedly at Glaviano's photos and they look familiar, but the more we observe them, the more the disquiet of the incongruous, the subversion of the world, the snake's egg, becomes clear.