I've started this project almost one year ago, not long after I moved to Berlin. But after the original idea I've got some technical problems to produce what I had in mind.
First problem was the bowl, here in Berlin I haven't found something so big, I've ordered it in Italy, but they were not going to ship it to me here. I've been in Italy to collect it and a friend of mine, Fabio Mattei - diving instructor - has helped me to create the final version of the bowl, putting together a neoprene neck glued to the plastic bowl.
I've tried the bowl on myself first, if i was going to ask people to go inside it, I had to know how it feels.
And it's a real strange feeeling, the bowl is heavy cause of the water, the air is not pure inside (although you've got some holes to breath from) and the feeling is to be wet, but your body is not, just your neck and your face.
After a while you start to relax (mostly) and you start to play with it, with different levels of water, to make it shake, to go underwater and play with air bubbles. In the beginning there were a lot of different situations i was thinking about and I've spent a lot of time collecting ideas and objects, but during the project and together with the interaction with people, I've changed them a lot.
Then the great problem was a photographic one: how to get the bowl to be full enlighted and round in the photo? I've first asked to Ema Discordant, a good friend and a photographer, to help me as a model, to understand how to get the proper light on. The first photos were good, but there was something missing. Then, working together with Sergio Assabbi (a very great argentinian photographer), I've decided to work with fluorecent light tubes and I really liked them, not only for the shape on the bowl, but also for the lighting result on the skin and their long range shadows.
In the last years, working on studio photography, I'd always the problem to be too much clean, with too much attention to the details with a significant loss of depth, energy and warmness of the image. So I've decided to have just a very simple canvas background, with the colour of the water, not pressed and with wrinkles.
And I really like the final result, although some friends told me that the white line in the background was distracting the attention of the beholder. This line is for me creating the illusion of an underwater world in the fake underwater scene and the light diffraction on the bowl borders is helping this illusion in the photos where there's no water inside the bowl.
I've asked some friends to be part of the project and my first 2 victims have been Alexandra and Jana. With Alexandra I tried to understand all the possible situations and the name DEAF is comed with her, when I asked her to write something on the steamed bowl, something that was related with the feeling inside the bowl and she wrotes DEAF in Cyrillic. Jana has been the first one to try water inside the bowl and I was a bit scared, also because it can be claustrophobic. The first result was funny, the part of the head underwater was magnified, something I had not thought about when i was planning it. Unfortunately I've then realised that the neck was too small for women and some water was falling during the photos (for some of them it has been a lot of water falling down, btw).
I've published on some websites a Call for Participation for actors, performers and normal people as well and I've been very glad to see how different people, with different backgrounds, have been able to react in a total different way to my project. Of course I'm been amazed by actors and performers, cause they're able to enter in their own world, to enter another dimension and to play in new ways with my original idea. For all the others, it has been a big surprise to see how they've adapt so well to my suggestions.
The final work is made by 18 photos and a side collection of other 12 that I'll publish later.
You can have a look at the collection here: www.norte.it/deaf.
