The Future Is Not What It Used To Be is a logbook in a disoriented navigation, a false map in a reality where the cardinal points are no longer to be found.
The Future Is Not What It Used To Be (2023) is on show from 29 October to 20 December 2024 after having been presented for the first time at the Torre dei Lambardi in Magione (Perugia) in the summer of 2024. On display there is a selection of 8 images from this recent series by Alessandra Baldoni, conceived at the time of the pandemic, when the author was asked to narrate 'the state of things' by reflecting on the emotional repercussions and wounds that were opening up.
The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, to quote a line from Mark Strand's The Way It Is, is a logbook in a disoriented navigation, a false map in a reality where the cardinal points are no longer to be found. In addition to the photographs in the exhibition, there are some ancient geographical instruments and poetic texts by Alessandra Baldoni, also a kind of compass in this dystonic journey.
The world was out of balance. The horizon had shifted to an extreme, blind point. Everything was outlined, lost, to be redefined. Things had suddenly changed and would continue to change. Something had been triggered, as we would later find out, and it would lead to a series of violent and seemingly unexpected events that would greatly increase the sense of instability and uncertainty.
In her projects, Alessandra Baldoni always tries to tell stories, to identify plots often barely visible or beneath the surface to give meaning to what is happening. She looks for an atlas, a sentimental geography that juxtaposes suggestions and evidence. Symbols that evoke, signs that whisper. Ancient statues, empty theatres, museums where works remain alone and unseen, landscapes, laconic details, remnants of a passage. Discovering what has been changed and how, investigating mistakes, short-circuits and solutions, portraying faces – uncertain and defenceless – and being told what people feel, giving body to words through details and situations, through metaphors.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with a text by Veruska Picchiarelli, a medievalist and curator at the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria. It contains the complete series of 24 works, as well as poetic reflections by Alessandra Baldoni and the text by Mark Strand, from which the author took the title of her work.
Veruska Picchiarelli: "In Alessandra Baldoni's work, an image does not exist for its own sake. It only becomes complete when it is combined with others. Or by merging with words. It is only in this way that the complexity of a thought is able to give way to its expression.
Ernst Gombrich recognised the existence of an innate human sense of order, thanks to which, in the most distant places and epochs, similar and recurring motifs could be produced in the creative act. A structure that underlies seeing and thinking, almost as if it were part of our common genetic heritage, that makes us perceive and reproduce certain forms, certain juxtapositions in our imagination. This is how Alessandra's associations seem to be born, as she travels with total freedom between epochs and genres, stories and myths, filtering with the most personal fantasies the suggestions on which her mind feeds".
