Metal Muses 2016 by Nicoletta Cossa

The "Metal Muses" project started on my place of work. The workers of the company have agreed to be immortalized to give birth to my own idiosyncrasy: the relationship between our body and the objects we use. In particular I focused on metal working tools that become an integral part of the lives of those who use them, becoming an extension of the body. Each person has specific skills and the continuous use of the object, eight hours or more a day, leads to a technical perfection and to a different and unique expertise for each person. The worker and the object share their working lives and one is an integral part of the other. I focused on their faces since it is in their faces, in their facial expressions that can be read fatigues, victories, defeats and everything that has marked their lives, working and not. Their gaze is the focus of the portrait, followed by the metal object chosen that enters the scene as a sparkling and vital part of the body, sometimes constrictive, sometimes reassuring, always familiar. The color makes the images more realistic than black and white, this is not a dream, a surreal trick. The actors are not models but the workers of the company. Their clothes were not studied specifically, they wear what they wear regularly at work and the photos were taken in the shift breaks. Similarly, the location is the internal mechanical workshop of the company, where the same metal tools have been found.

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