loredana denicola
a new society
unfinished photographic project
digital colour photography (since 2016)
What does it mean to be conscious?
A new society is a digital photography project exploring human consciousness as a shifting condition rather than a fixed state. It reflects on awareness at different levels — perception of the external world, self-recognition, and the unstable boundary between them.
The images propose a symbolic evolution of the human body and mind.
A foetus appears in the head rather than the womb — a displacement that questions origin, identity, and reproduction as biological and conceptual systems.
This figure does not represent resolution.
It opens a space of uncertainty around transformation, knowledge, and the limits of perception.
The project moves between imagination and critique, questioning what forms of consciousness are possible, and at what cost they emerge.
Rather than proposing a unified society, it explores the desire for unity — and the tension this desire creates.
A new society is a conceptual photography and art project currently in progress.
It brings together sculptural elements, photographic work, and symbolic figures such as the fetal mask and the child — objects that exist between form and idea, image and metaphor.
The project has been developed over a long and fragmented process of construction and interruption.
Some parts remain incomplete.
This incompleteness is not a limitation, but part of its structure.
The foetal mask and the child were conceived by me and developed in collaboration with Samuele Sulas, whose contribution expanded the visual and symbolic language of the work.
The project emerged through experimentation with identity, transformation, and constructed social narratives.
It moves between individual authorship and collaboration, between control and uncertainty.
Working on A new society has required stepping outside established methods of practice, engaging with material processes and unstable conceptual frameworks.
Rather than resolving into a fixed outcome, the project remains open — shaped by interruption, revision, and ongoing negotiation.
THE INDIVIDUAL
THE MOTHER
The figure of the Mother exists between grotesque form and fragile beauty, suspended in a state of radical disconnection.
She gives birth to a child she cannot reach.
Her elongated arms render gesture almost impossible — a body present but functionally interrupted, unable to complete the act of holding.
The scene unfolds as a condition rather than a narrative.
A separation between presence and contact.
Above the composition, the words appear: “Get me out of here.”
A fragment of voice emerging from the newborn — not as dialogue, but as distance.
A desire for touch that remains unanswered.
The project began with a simple question: how can birth be translated into image?
From initial sketches to ink drawings, the work gradually shifted from representation to construction.
The final piece incorporates the child within the structure of the dress itself — a form that acts simultaneously as womb and boundary.
The face of the model is covered, not to erase identity, but to redirect attention toward the body as site of tension, control, and interruption.
THE CHILD
The child is symbolically trapped within the fabric of the mother’s dress, unable to find separation or contact.
The boundary between bodies is unstable. The child appears to emerge from, and at the same time be absorbed by, the folds of the garment — suspended between presence and disappearance.
Its form is fragile and contorted, as if held in a position that resists comfort, movement, or resolution.
Within this suspended state, a fragment of voice appears: “Get me out of here.”
A silent cry that does not resolve into action, but remains as tension.
The work unfolds as a meditation on birth not as event, but as condition — a structure of relation that is already fractured at its origin.
The dress becomes both container and barrier, a space where protection and confinement overlap.
The face is obscured, shifting attention away from identity and toward the dynamics of relation, dependency, and separation.
What emerges is not a narrative of motherhood, but a suspended system of connection and distance.
The proximity of bodies does not translate into understanding or care.
It reveals instead the fragility of bonds — how closeness can coexist with radical disconnection.
In this stillness, the work returns to a fundamental question:
what does it mean to be held, when contact does not become relation?