From the series MONUMENTS which I completed in the summer of 2023 as an artist-in-residence at La Baldi – Cultivate in Tuscany, Italy.

Monuments are typically public artworks erected in cities that say something about the history, collective memory and politics of a place. This series explores the meaning of monuments in the Tuscan village of Montegiovi.

The vast majority of Montegiovi’s residents recently voted for the country’s most right-wing government since World War II. Meanwhile, the landscape of Tuscany, famous for its beauty, its olive oil and its wines, now faces a highly uncertain future due to droughts and other effects of climate change. Against this backdrop, what are the things encountered in everyday life that have monumental value and why?

The series also explores depression as a system of perception. These “monuments” are all figments of a depressive imagination as it drifts through the landscape, evidence of the numerous ways that one’s psychopathology interacts with the aesthetics of place.