Questions On is a video interview format created by C41. Three are the ‘simple’ questions asked to our network friends, partners and creative minds. They tackle the current situation: How do they see their future, what kind of changes do they expect and how they are going to react to this unusual situation that we are living these days?
The eleventh episode is with Alessandro Furchino Capria, photographer born in Turin, currently based between Milan and London. His eye for photography is a sophisticated one – beauty is captured in the most natural way thanks to its classic taste for composition and lighting. Furchino Capria’s practice is driven by an evident love for balance between proportions and an overall image neatness. Still, it is completely free from any type of manipulation.
You can watch the interview on the C41 YouTube channel and also read it below.
1. Future — How do you feel about your future when everything will be back to normal?
My future. It’s not my future, the topic of the matter is the future in general. I’m not able to imagine it, I thought about it a lot in order to record this video you asked me to do and I can’t imagine it at all. Meaning that every time I had been thinking about how it could eventually be I found myself fantasizing about something that would somehow stay utopic or probably not feasible. So I decided that I would have faced this moment to deepen my self-knowledge trying to have a deeper understanding of who I have been, what we have been, what this is, of what it’s made and what has happened to our past, what is our past, further analyzing the present in order to try becoming more solid and clearer with myself. So probably having some more tools to define the future because imagining it is something that is clearly feasible but still extremely difficult. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a future, it doesn’t mean that the future will be absolutely negative. As far as I’m concerned, on the contrary, a very interesting kind of future is inevitably waiting for us because it will be our future and we will have to make it interesting. However we clearly must wait without being too anxious to go and build this future without the right tools as soon as I think the only clear thing to everybody is that it won’t be absolutely the one we expected it to be.
2. Change — What kind of changes will affect society, work environment and world itself?
How will it change? I don’t know that either. I don’t know a lot of things. It will change…on many aspects. I hope it won’t change too much, what I absolutely don’t want to lose is the freedom to move, I would hate to give up the flexibility that made us able to move within States and within our lives. Today it seems that these kind of normalities have somehow become extremely far away, so I certainly know what I would like not to change but I also know that there are some things I would like to change. So, unavoidably, there are aspects of our way of living, that today we can define past that I would like us to quit, like everything that could damage both our quality of life and the world system in which we used to live and are living, but this said, how will the world change is very complex and I do not have the tools and probably the knowledge to be able to assume how the world will change.
I can imagine that it will certainly change at the beginning of the period that follows this experience, the fact that we will get back many of the things we now had to put on standby it’s not said, I hope that it will not change in a negative way, or more negative, so that the limitations concerning our way of living won’t increase. In this month, in these two months, in this period, the biggest thing we have lost in my opinion is freedom. Being able to move freely in spaces, through spaces. We have been losing the chance to see people the way we used to see them. We have been losing everything on which we based our days on. So it’s hard to think that there could be a change that…what kind of change could there be? Will the way we work change? Will the way we go out change? Will this change the way we travel, will it change us? It’s very likely to happen, it is absolutely probable that we will find ourselves changed when outside of this period, we will perhaps be more suspicious of our neighbor, of the person we meet on the street, we will be more suspicious of those who tell us what can be done and what cannot. The risk that the sense of distrust or kind of suspicion will increase is one of the greater possibilities I see in front of me and it is a drastically negative attitude that I hope we won’t ever implement but that somehow I think we will.
Now I don’t want to be a pessimist, I don’t want to sound pessimistic from what I say; it might sound like I am a pessimist but I just try to be as realistic as possible. I don’t want to make optimistic discourses, we will surely improve, everything will inevitably change, we will go out again, we’ll go back and lie in the sun at the park, this is probably the clearest part of our future. The issue is that some mechanisms and manners have broken down, in a short time, things we should rebuild if we want them back.
I do not want to say that we will change for the better or that we will change for the worse, I do not know how we will change. I know that we have changed, I know that this period has somehow given us time to reflect, and so it is correct for us to remind that we will change. I’m not a holy man by trade so I don’t know what will change, I know that many things will change but specifically I don’t know which ones because they are all part of the life-package that will inevitably be different from what it was before because our fears will be increased, anxieties, somehow the stress will be decreased because we had more time to think, but there will be the afterward stress, all this anxiety of having to position ourselves again while redefining. I believe that it is right to fully enjoy the present, understanding the oneself way better as to be ready, but ready knowing very well ourselves and our limits and consequently the limits of society, the limits of ourselves towards society, the limits of society itself in order to be able to further analyze what the next step will be and consequently steps 2-3-4.
The changing plan, the broad one, isn’t up to us to be defined because we do not have the possibility to do it. As we’ve seen, just a few people have been in charge of deciding about our lives, a few people have defined the regime of our lives in the last two or three months. They have been hiding behind the finger of “we do it for you” and ok, but unfortunately we do not have the power to generate a big change and the story of “if we are all together…” to me somehow doesn’t have an effect, we need to change ourselves first. We have to change our vision of ourselves, our perception, our projection into the future through the image of ourselves in the present. We cannot think to change the world, of being capable to change the world, these are dynamics already too big for us as soon as we are not able to understand ourselves finding a position for our presence in the system, because the system is so complex that it is inevitably incomprehensible in its complexity. We must try to define ourselves further, and that is the great change I expect at the end of the day. We need to change how we are in order to relocate ourselves into what the system will be.
3. Reactions — What are your reactions to this essential process of adaptation?
Last Question. Last point. How do you think you will answer to this inevitable process of adaptation. How I think I will reply…We will have to change, I will have to change, I will have to adapt, I will have to differ, I will have to continue studying even more than I did until now. I’ll have to try to go deeper into what I do, surely I’ll have to be more flexible again. If being already so flexible wasn’t enough we have to start being even more flexible especially in the first period after the end of the limitations, that nobody knows when it will be. But yes, on a personal level I think that the best answer to this question is that of being as flexible as possible, as malleable as possible in order to be able to adapt to what it will be. The prediction is that of having to adapt to a change, this is clear, but what will be the change as we have already discussed is difficult to be defined, so I think that the attitude will be the central thing. The attitude through which we will face the change or the new step that will define how we will come out of it, how we will move forward.
What I think is drastically important isn’t the precise action but the approach. As for me act in itself is not definable. I do not have the crystal sphere that helps me to know what will happen consequently being able to define the first move. I can think of a series of scenarios from the most feasible, to the simplest; to the most sensitive, to the most complex, to the worst and try to define strategies for every possible scenario. We can clearly think about doing this, being more scientific. What is everything is related to? To our life? Our way of living? Our work? It also depends on what level we are talking about, but more than with a precise action I think we should respond in a manner itself, so being very adaptable and flexible, without trying to be fixed on the “but before it was better, that’s how we were doing it”. The past must be understood, what has been until yesterday must be understood, it must be metabolized, internalized but it must be something on which we do not fossilize on, on which we do not focus too much wanting it back, we must inevitably go forward because unfortunately the road that we have to face is only the one in front of us and we will have to define it, we will have to asphalt it again with a more contemporary technique. We should think about the future but also being very present and we will certainly have to be drastically flexible and consistent.
Credits:
Featuring: Alessandro Furchino Capria @alessandrofurchinocapria
Curated by Riccardo Fantoni Montana, Luca A. Caizzi, Barbara Guieu
Words: Riccardo Fantoni Montana, Stefania Zanetti
Editing: Vittoria Elena Simone
Line production: Alice De Santis
Visual: C41.eu
Thanks to: Alessandro De Agostini, Robin Stauder