PANDEMIC POSTCARDS a project by Nicola Bertasi curated by Valeria Ribaldi graphic design: Francesca Todde / Départ pour l’Image

In the first period of confinement due to Covid-19, the photographer Nicola Bertasi, during his research, came across an American public photographic archive in which he found evidence of significant moments of the Spanish flu of 1918-19 in the United States.

As in a clouded and confused dream, those images of the early 1900s populated by figures with masks, signs with prohibitions and makeshift hospitals, were mixed and superimposed not only with the dramatic and daily ones of the media, but also with the bombardment of commercial advertisements and banners of new products that have suddenly become indispensable to face the emergency.
The Pandemic Postcards rest on a continuous parallelism of elements and events that follow one another, almost by an ironic game of fate, both visually and in fact very similar between present and past. The corpus of works is made up of digital collages and graphic interventions that the author has performed out of ten images selected from the most significant of the archive.

The ten Pandemic Postcards were designed by  Nicola Bertasi as part of the larger project he worked on with curator Valeria Ribaldi: Pandemic Papers. Pandemic Papers starts from postcards and evolves into other visual elements and archival documents that develop into tables, posters and set-up materials.