_bacco_._4real
Photographer Giacomo Infantino’s series is a meeting point between two different generations, Millennials and Generation Z, exploring the topic of digital identity and its consequences.
Photography and Text Giacomo Infantino
This work dwells on one suburban young boy’s personal story: 2007 class, he belongs to the so-called Generation Z. His house is positioned between the rural hills placed at the foot of the mountains, which embrace northern Italy’s Lake Maggiore: a context where the geographical and social marginalisation is still permeated in the people who live in this place, especially when they are this young.
“_bacco_._4real” is the name the young boy uses on social media. The etymology of the nickname is composed of the surname, Bacco, and the word “4real”. This dichotomy becomes the key to understanding the entire process of collaboration, which takes place between the artist and the boy, as it serves as a paradoxical element for the investigation of the research. “4real” seems to mean Bacco’s real form of today, a concrete identity, which is exclusively spread through social media.
The author’s goal is follow, along with the boy, different paths of pedagogical character, in which the more sensitive and delicate aspects the young boy has can emerge; they concern his own perception of his identity, his body and how they are spread through the internet: the synthesis of an idealised identity, which is able to act in real life, becomes a symbolic key to the entire creative process.
The focal points of how this medial transposition of digital identity pass through the use of famous filters proposed by Instagram, enhanced reality, but most of all, in Bacco’s case, videogames. In this day and age, they are a real community, which is able to make the “gamer’s” experience less and less passive and, not unlike in other virtual realities, it is possible to communicate using multiple forms. In his “concrete space” he, unconsciously, translates his identity into a perilous and fictitious form, which is able to be mould at will, in his physical appearance and in his own abilities. Here Bacco finds an ideal place where he can be himself, relating himself to the fictitious and artificial landscape in which he immerses his digital alter ego.
This journey finds its outcome in the creation of a series of images crafted on multiple layers and through different tools: the smartphone, the computer and the Polaroid; through them, a synthesis of the imaginary reality is re-established, all the more tangible and concrete.
The series “_bacco_._4real” is a meeting point between two young men who belong to two different generations, Millennials and Generation Z, which align on the topics of loneliness, marginalization, bullying and body shaming. The digital identity becomes the key to understanding new perspectives from multiple aspects, negative and positive, which today influence, in an allegoric key, not only this suburban young boy’s story, but also an entire generation’s.
About Giacomo
Born in Varese in 1993, he graduated in New Technology of Art – Art and Media – at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan, with a thesis on public commissions in Italy. Subsequently he continues, in the same institution, the Master in Photography and Visual Arts that will lead him to move abroad to complete his studies at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany. Since 2020 he is a contributor for ZONE Magazine and currently works for Phroom Magazine.
To see more Giacomo’s work, please visit his website or follow him on Instagram
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