Valentina Sommariva, photographer of fissures

Her Cicatrici [Scars] series dwells on the marks left by the earthquake that rocked Central Italy in 2016 – of various kinds, they are to be found on the land, on the skin of survivors and on residential spaces. There’s a sense of fracture, and Sommariva’s personal projects evidence a specific and thematic interest in the concept of permeability and migration, changing states, subsidence, discontinuities, and plunder, which permeates her karstic photography. It surfaces in different areas of her work, such as advertising campaigns (set in one case literally inside a quarry, or amid alien-looking dolomitic landscapes) and in her photos of interiors in which architecture and nature often switch planes. There are a number of Wunderkammers, antonomastic places of fusion, juxtaposition and protean multiplicity. Sommariva’s camera tends to pause on places of potential transit, an opening, a gaping wound, a threshold.