Domenico (Mimmo) Cozzolino
"Arcadia del Sud is a digital reworking of a series of shots I took in the mid to late 1960s which I now particularly like because they show my parents literally basking in their new-found economic freedom as ‘New Australians’ in the land I have called ‘Arcadia of the South’. Arcadia del Sud with its visible economic trappings is, on the surface, a picture of suburban simplicity, innocence and bliss. But to my mind it was, and will always be, a lonely and culturally isolated and deprived place for my parents to inhabit, leading to depression and cultural displacement. This is the enormous sacrifice most first generation migrants make.
A plastic soft drink container discarded somewhere in metropolitan Melbourne in the late 1970s turns up twenty years later on the banks of the River Yarra. Where was it thrown away? Where has it been hiding all this time? How many tides has it bopped in? If only I could read the soft hieroglyphics on the plastic…The high resolution, direct from object digital scans, more than photographs, pick it all up...The twenty-two soft drink containers for FLUSH were collected between 1990 and 2003 underneath where the Westgate Bridge spans the Yarra in the Port of Melbourne.
Sub-Urban Shadow-Plays is a series of collaborative, photomedia portraits, mostly of close friends, and friends of friends. I asked them to bring some meaningful objects to a pre-arranged photo shoot in a studio…What I wanted to do originally with this project was to photograph couples in long-term relationships (twenty years or more)…After the first few sessions…the things that I had asked people to bring to the shoot were…talking about their owners in unusually interesting ways. I was lured into thinking I was a director controlling life on a stage."
(Mimmo Cozzolino 2007)
