FORMAE VITAE
Life Before Identity
Life does not need an identity in order to manifest itself.
Before a name, before a face, before the awareness of being someone, Life already manifests itself through matter. It takes shape, moves, and occupies space. Identity comes later: it is what distinguishes an individual from the anonymous form of Life.
Formae Vitae explores this original condition. The face disappears because it is not necessary for Life to manifest itself. Stripped of individual recognition, the human figure no longer represents someone, but becomes body, form, mass: an anonymous presence through which Life enters the visible world.
Gestures, postures, overlapping forms, and matter neither define a character nor construct a narrative. They convey a presence that has yet to acquire a distinct identity, in which the individual appears only as a possibility.
The removal of the face thus becomes a condition of the inquiry. By eliminating what normally allows us to recognize another as an individual, photography shifts our gaze towards what precedes recognition: the body as a living, anonymous, and transient form.
In Formae Vitae, Life does not create the individual: it precedes the individual and, in its continuous manifestation, also tends to absorb the individual back into its own matter.
The project thus questions the boundary between being alive and being someone.
If Life gives us a form, it is through Existence that we become who we are.