Nicola Bertasi, Pandemic Postcards, 2021

Pandemic Postcards was born, like the best stories, out of a chance encounter. During the first period of confinement due to Covid-19, the photographer Nicola Bertasi, during his research, came across an American public photo archive in which he found evidence of some significant moments of the Spanish flu of 1918-19 in the United States. As in a foggy and confused dream, those images of the beginning of the 20th century, populated by figures with masks, banned signs and makeshift hospitals, were mixed and overlapped not only with the dramatic and daily images of the media, but also with the bombardment of commercial announcements and banners of new products that suddenly became indispensable to face the emergency. The Pandemic Postcards are based on a continuous parallelism of elements and events that, almost for an ironic game of fate, follow each other is visually, and in fact, very similar between present and past. For this reason, their birth was a spontaneous act that Nicola Bertasi could not avoid: the aesthetic and substantial similarities between the two pandemics and their impact on society, even after a century, turned out to be too many.