La città del disincanto
2013-2015
— A photographic journey through Edenlandia, the first amusement park in Europe, built in Naples in 1965. Photographed during the years of its closure, the park appears as a suspended theatre where lights, attractions and artificial landscapes persist in the absence of visitors. Between abandonment and reactivation, the work explores the fragile boundary between childhood memory and disillusion, revealing lingering traces of enchantment within the visible ruin of entertainment.
Built in 1965, just ten years after Disneyland (which was created by Walt Disney in the outskirts of Los Angeles), Edenlandia was the first amusement park in Europe. Here, two generations of Neapolitan children, in the company of their parents, had possibly the most striking encounter with the world of fairy tales, before the park was closed down and abandoned to the decay of the suburbs surrounding it.
The choice to represent a place that is long dead with respect to the reason for its creation and life, the decision to meet again the long gone time of childhood by photographing the visible ruin of the figures that had magically animated the first images of memory, means facing the original core of our world and of every person (who, like Scotti, is searching for a new image of the world).
Vladimir Propp reminds us that the fairy tale begins with a disabling condition or with someone being damaged… or with the wish to own something… and it develops through the protagonist’s departure from his parents’ home, the encounter with a benefactor who gives him a magic tool… thanks to which he finds the object of his searches.
It is the encounter with the pain of passion that provides every person and every authentic artist, such as Giovanni Scotti, with the means to find not what is forever lost, but the light that illuminates and gives meaning to the journey of life.
Giovanni Scotti’s photographic work is the fruit of a long process and of the aware critical dialogue between the identity of the national genealogy of the authors of Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy), and the international context, which is mainly dominated by the Bechers’ and Düsseldorfer Schule‘s method, with its elimination of the encounter deriving from the event of living, a new objectivity that cancels all passions and emotions, and the disappearance of the unique image within an equally unique narrative sequence.
With the same accuracy as Thomas Struth’s or Candida Hofer’s, Giovanni Scotti undertakes the photographic journey, but going in the opposite direction, that is towards the adventure of knowledge through the image, the unexpected and undefinable event of the light that for a moment illuminates the time and space of our living.
Giovanni Chiaramonte
Photographer and critic
Excerpt from the critical essay "Fantasmagorie d'iniziazione",
published in the photo book La città del disincanto (The city of disillusion), 2015