The Manikins series illustrates how far we have come from the days when Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, inscribed in a perfect circle, was the measure of all things, or Caspar David Friedrich's Wayfarer, seen from behind, conveyed a sense of infinity and bewilderment at the power of nature.
In Manikins, as Tina Cosmai explains, man is placed 'at the centre of a reticular reality permeated by technology that transforms everything into abstract shapes and geometries'. Between the cranes, the beach, the benches, the piers, man is a prisoner of the very reality he has helped to build. Loneliness then becomes the existential situation of individuals who claim their own small space, separated from each other and from the community. Unable to converse, they wander aimlessly, hypnotised by the juggernaut of technology, which drives them towards a regressive drift in which ancestral monsters reappear. Beneath the securitising rationality of lines and volumes, the primordial fears of an ego increasingly suffocated and compressed by hyper-modernity resurface. In this hallucinatory scenario, people become, without realising it, mannequins of themselves, trapped in the dense web of abstractions that they often create unconsciously.
This sense of alienation, of loneliness, of the inability of modern man to get back in touch with nature, is stylistically well expressed by the author, thanks to the skilful use of "poetic images", as Gigliola Foschi defines them in the volume Via di Fuga a Mare, published by Contrasto in 2022.
These are images that the author creates both by subtraction - eliminating all the elements that she considers useless to the effectiveness of the story - and by addition - adding others that she considers indispensable to the narrative - while modifying the tones to the point where these photographs look like watercolours with bleached skies.
This construct gives Tina Cosmai's photographs 'a touch of suspension, of timelessness, envelops them in a veil of tenderness, transforming them into networks of affinities' - writes Gigliola Foschi in her catalogue essay - between the observer of the image and the person portrayed in the image, adding that they are 'images like figures of distance, of silence, of a whispered speech, almost in hints. Photographs of the same place that change from image to image, as if they wanted to lead us on a motionless journey towards an elsewhere of thought that leads us into our relationship with nature and time, with ourselves and our loneliness'.
