Draw your future is a photographic project and a human journey that the author has developed over the past 6 years. The project consists of a series of photographs which have as their subject the drawing by children between 6 and 9 years of age, representing the theme: “what will you do when you grow up: what is your dream?”. The goal of the project is to investigate the relationship that links the aspirations of the younger generations with the “environment” in which they grow up. The project develops in different places and involves children with different socio-cultural backgrounds. The first work was made in the place where the author spent his childhood in the province of Venice; 15 children were involved. Subsequently in 2015, as part of the international Land Art festival “Land shape in North Jutland”, for which he was selected, and interested 15 other Danish children. Recently, the project was carried out with 29 children from an international school in Chiang Mai, within an artist’s residence in Northern Thailand. Participation saw children from China, Japan and Thailand. In this project, each child becomes the protagonist of his work, from start to finish, giving life to gender stereotypes-free images. The dream finds its representation in an open space, in contact with nature, where the child interprets his idea of the future. The project actively involved families, schools and cultural associations.
GALLERY
You say: it is tiring to associate with children.
You are right.
Then you add: you have to get down to their level,
stoop, reach, bend, become small as they are.
Now you are wrong.
This is not the most tiring thing.
It is rather the fact of being obliged to rise
up to their feelings.
pulling,
stretching, standing on your tiptoes.
not to hurt them “.
(J. Korczack)
The effort of working with the children, he said Korczack is to rise oneself to nobility of their feelings, and it is precisely from this careful and sensitive attempt, that even the work of Enrico Migotto seems to start, trying to listen through his images before any interpretation. Enrico went back to the home where he was born, wondering what they were, twenty years after, his childhood, the dreams of the children grown up in his own village, in a different background and yet so familiar. He asked them to imagine their future and to draw it, big enough to make it inhabitable even only for a moment. Drawings are made of small stones, trails of direction reminiscent of fairy tales pebbles dropped in the woods in order to find the way back home. But this is not to the past we are going back to, we go towards the future, with attempts of imagination guiding the steps of our growth. Because growing up is an experience of approximation, it is a deadly serious game in which you can measure with a time in history greater than the one in which we are immersed. Children’s dreams tell us about passions and professions, some full of the charm of discovery, as the paleontologist, some as ancient as the farmer, and others just born like the designer who ecstatically watches her models lying in the middle of a walkway.
Enrico’s images are always full of care, rigorous and yet reserved, not flaunting the care they needed to achieve them, or ogle the glamour with which advertising takes possession of his childhood and his imaginary world . Enrico observes, allowing the gestures to be fulfilled with his glance, so that the images finally come to the light, reminding us that the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, between photography and dream, are much more subtle than we can imagine.
Virginia Farina