Monica Gorini

Italian photographer Monica Gorini (@gorinimonica) creates photographs inspired by her experiences teaching the blind and her love of nature. Monica has always combined her teaching with the arts, creating a cooperation with Academy of Fine Arts and the Institute of Blind People. Her work is often accompanied by text: poems written by the artist herself. Monica’s work is multisensory and based on a blend of different languages and forms of communication. Her work combines her passion for nature and the rights of the planet. Monica mixes her own personal narrative with philosophical and scientific theories to create a single narration. “She is in search of an aesthetic purpose stimulating current and intimate thoughts, aimed at developing social consciousness and a new spiritual ecology of the world.”

Monica’s ongoing series You are Burning our Future is a collaboration with her young nieces, Elena and Cecilia ages 8 and 10. While Monica and her nieces share a strong love for Mother Earth, they share an equal concern for Earth’s future. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish girl who created the global movement Friday’s for Future is looked up to by Monica’s nieces. The girls view Greta as the hero the world needs and admire her grace and inner strength to persist. Monica splits her time between Milan and a small town near Lake Orta in Northern Italy where her nieces live. Living in a small town has developed their relationship with nature. The series is accompanied by an original poem inspired by the girls’ and their vision and ideas based on an adult woman, written for the person who started off the Anthropocene, our current era.

Looking at the image titled You are Burning our Future, we see a hallway that looks as if the viewer is looking down a long prison cell surrounded by metal bars. At the end of the hallway is the writing on the wall, ‘you are burning our future’. From the beginning of the hallway you can see the writing, however it’s not immediately noticeable or easily read until the viewer begins to move (zoom in) down the hallway. By the time the viewer gets close enough to read it easily it’s probably too late. There is no escape, we are locked in. An analogy perhaps, for the current generation of young people and specifically how Elena and Cecelia feel about the current status of the climate, how it is not being taken seriously enough by global leaders and policy makers.