FORMAE VITAE
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 exists. It moves through matter, assumes a form, and makes presence possible. Identity belongs to a subsequent process: it takes shape through Existence, through our relationship with time, with the world, and with what we encounter as we become who we are.
Formae Vitae explores this primordial condition. The face disappears because it is not yet necessary. Freed from the possibility of individual recognition, the human figure no longer represents someone, but becomes one of the forms through which Life temporarily takes shape.
Gestures, postures, movements, and matter do not define a character or construct a narrative. They make perceptible a presence that does not yet possess a determined identity: a living form that contains the possibility of the individual without yet coinciding with it.
The subtraction of the face thus becomes a condition of inquiry. By removing what ordinarily allows us to recognise another person as an individual, photography directs the gaze towards something more elemental: the manifestation of Life before Existence gives it a history, a consciousness, and an identity.
Each work observes a different possibility of this manifestation. The body appears as a transitory form, a condition through which Life enters the visible and begins its journey through Existence.
Formae Vitae 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.