SCALA DEI TURCHI

In 2017 during a trip in Sicily in his family’s native country, the artist is told about a special place called “Scala dei Turchi”, a white clay beach with stunning and minimalist lunar landscapes. After some quick researches on the internet, he took his camera and hit the road in the stifling heat toward this place. On the spot, it’s a disappointment. The purity of the place he imagined was totally covered by the private parking lots, the bars and restaurants, turning this place that was supposed to be magical into a packed tourist attraction. Upset, he only took a few photos of points of view he found interesting, thinking he would come back after the tourist season to avoid a crowd of visitors fond of selfies. Back in Paris, something encouraged him to edit his photos. He decided to use them as a basis to artificially create the mental pictures he imagined during his trip. Erasing humans from these pictures enabled him to get them to the limits of abstraction, generating a new reality. By creating what he couldn’t reach, Richard Dell’aiera turn this real landscape into a spiritual landscape, going from the reachable reality to the virtual world by using digital tools and photomontage, while questioning the links and dissonances between reality and mental pictures. Considered as the second part of the Scala Dei Turchi series, the Scala Persistenza series focuses on memory, especially on memory persistence. “I wanted to make everything disappear. Their presence, their little holiday bliss, their love messages written in clay. With a digital tool I erased any track of their trip in this place when I was there. But I couldn’t erase them from my memory. They are residues, visual parasites of my perfect mental pictures.” According to Richard Dell’aiera, memory is not frozen. It looks like something tractable, moving, evolving with time, moods and sensations. The shape of memory is evolving; that’s why animation and video installation were suitable for this work.