Alessia Rapetti - Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis enclose a series of reflections on the relationship between human and non-human, between body and world and between life and death. The set of photographs and illustrations are an attempt to narrate the natural transience of life whose death is nothing more than the moment of metamorphosis from one body to another.
According to a legend of the aboriginal peoples of the Banks Islands, men were initially immortal. Like snakes, when their skin began to be wrinkled by time, they shed it to make space for a new, young skin. One old woman, when her skin began to show too many traces of time, went to the river and shed it. Back home her son refused to approach her, not recognising her even though his mother kept telling him that she was still his mother but with new skin. To reassure the child, the woman decided to return to the river and put on her old skin again: From that day, according to the legend, once men grew old, they began to die.
The skin, which is what distinguishes us from the rest, what guards our essence, evolves over time. It contracts, stretches, scales, hardens and then softens again. There is no such thing as immobility: everything changes in order to remain itself.
Just as a snake continues to live by changing its skin, so I began to see what surrounds us as the continuity of what has been reborn in a new form. During my long walks in the woods, I seemed to have empathy, to see strong personalities in the trees that reminded me of those of my departed beloved ones. Even the stones seemed to me like the great family tree of my life, the portion of space in which I could find myself, to be able to read my origins in the thick layering lines of time
What is the difference between a human and a tree? Are we not all part of the same essence? Independently of our shape, size, geographical location, culture, each one of us is able to identify with the world around us: the rocky stratification is for us the historical archive of our existence, the place where we can read the history of our humanity, the earth beneath our feet is the place where everything rests and where death is transformed into life, in a cycle of continuous rebirth. Time becomes a loop that closes in on itself and we are no longer able to unravel the skein that binds past, present and future.