RESEARCH
How does Existence manifest itself?
This question is the starting point of Marco Simonelli's artistic research.
Rather than pursuing a predefined photographic style, each project begins with an inquiry. Photography, together with the visual, technical and conceptual languages required by each investigation, becomes the means through which that question is explored. As a consequence, the photographic language is never predetermined, but emerges naturally from the research itself.
Because every project originates from a question, the research always precedes the image. The photograph is therefore not its objective, but one of the forms through which the investigation becomes visible.
The research approaches the manifestations of Existence through three complementary fields of investigation.
Life explores Existence through the human condition: identity, perception, relationships, spirituality, freedom, time and transcendence.
Matter investigates Existence through the material world: organic forms, transformation, memory, architecture, natural processes and perception.
Ektos, from the Greek ektós (“beyond”, “outside”), brings together projects in which photography itself becomes the field of investigation. Here, the image no longer seeks only to represent reality. It transforms perception into experience, allowing new possibilities of seeing and new manifestations of Existence to emerge.
These are not thematic categories nor separate bodies of work, but three fields generated by the same inquiry. Each project develops its own visual language as a natural consequence of the question from which it originates.
Together, they form a single body of research whose coherence lies not in a shared aesthetic, but in the continuity of the question that generates every work.