Luca Massaro, VIETNIK, 2019

The work “Vietnik” addresses the intrinsic duality of the photographic medium and its tie to the performative construction of identities. “Photography is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of the awareness of identity”. Vietnik is a musical pseudonym, a proxy, a cyborg, a “self-portrait as a building and bildung”.

The double (spatial and temporal, photographic and musical, of images and words) is a recurring motif, like a refrain – in the publication as in the installations and previous works. A temporal tension, between the tradition of the American trip and its differences and repetitions in today digital world, underlies all the works of this dual representation of old captions and new images.

The book’s structure emulates and subverts the increasingly popular Hollywood format of the biopic. How does this trend of today cultural consumer is connected to the performative construction of social identities? How much of me appears in the photographed “persona” (“mask” -Latin, “public image” -English)?

The complex work is comprised of a 9 chapters book & website and a series of installations: all the clues and false narratives tend to blend the gap between opposed binaries and ambigous terms such as “persona”, double, online presence, social performativity, bildungsroman and synesthesia.