31 Dicembre (31st December) is an intimate and explicitly autobiographical series. It was published for the first time in 2011 by 24 Ore Cultura in Mario Giacomelli. Sotto la pelle del reale. Giacomelli took the photographs one afternoon while he waited for a masked party with friends to begin: the date was the 31st December 1997.
The silence is palpable as Giacomelli plays with the projection of his shadow on a cracked wall. Everything feels tangibly textured, and even the shadows seem realer than reality. And yet, everything is a dream. Giacomelli allows encounters from time gone by to resurface, imprinting them directly from his memory onto the photographic film. They still feel possible.
The photographs from 31 Dicembre were created as a ritual of purification: using his “poetic companions” (the dogs and the fake birds that figure in this latter period of work) Giacomelli stages an encounter with his unconscious.
From the mid 1990s onwards, Giacomelli concentrated on this interior journeying. From this period there emerged several interconnected series: Cremonini, Autoritratti (Self-portraits), Bucci, Ricordi di un ragazzo del ‘25 (Memories of a boy from 1925), Questo ricordo lo vorrei raccontare (I’d like to tell you about this memory), La domenica prima (The Sunday before). The absence of a human subject (substituted by his “poetic companions”) means the scene of each photograph becomes an open-air theatre immersed in silence.
