ALMA BIBOLOTTI
// Alma Bibolotti is a photographer/artist from Bari in Southern Italy. Photography is an inner travel, her own way of dealing with emotions. Liquid entropy: the floating world is part of her ongoing project based on nature and offers a glimpse into Alma´s exploration of water textures and shapes as a subject.
Alma graduated in foreign languages and literature, moving to France where she lived for six years between Nice and Paris. Photography plays a big role in her life, shadows and lights are a way of shaping her reality. “The outer space gives voice to my ‘inner gaze’. In all my images, I aim to render what I feel while shooting, rather than what I witness, and today I like experimenting with digital art in all its dimensions: much of my work focuses upon the language of nature, on my relationship with landscape and natural world,” she says.
In 2019 she won the finalist award of ‘International Garden Photographer of the Year’ at the London Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In 2022 her portfolio ‘Arborum sudaria’ was exhibitd and got an honourable mention in the international contest ‘Transversalidades – Fotografia sem fronteiras’.
“A work of art should be like a well-planned crime. The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.”
Charles Baudelaire
What draws you to the arts?
“Since I was very young I used to attend all kinds of art events, such as the Venice Biennale or the Arles photography festival. But, of course, I love visiting museums: some of the artists I particularly like are Turner, Monet, Bacon, Henry Moore, Hans Arp, Brancusi. My relationship with photography started when I I was quite young and I discovered Giacometti, Fontana, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Lucien Clergue, Mimmo Iodice, Imogen Cunningham, and many other masters whose works still have a strong influence on my vision. Photography plays a main role in my life: it is an inner travel, my own way to deal with my deepest emotions.”
What do you like best about artful photography such as the images you have shared with us?
“My exploration of the water ‘forms’ as a subject. Water fascinates me most of all for its visual complexity.”
Liquid entropy: the floating world is a series of diptychs that are part of an ongoing project based on nature and offer a glimpse into Alma´s exploration of water as a subject. Water fascinates her for its overwhelming allure, the range of emotions it encompasses, for its ultimate significance as the liquid of life, but most of all, for its visual complexity. Entropy* by definition is the degree of randomness or disorder in matter. “Liquid entropy is the result of what water elicits in me, both visually and subliminally. As real as water is, it creates the most abstract scenes with its shapes dancing and vanishing in a very short lapse of time. With its web of undulations, patterns of ripples and waves, water offers conceptual scenes that are impermanent to the observer, a fluid rhythm that never stops, unnoticed, rather than undetectable. My emotional relationship with this “floating world” is characterised by a sort of rarefaction and nostalgia, as in a dream where the surface becomes a flow shaping curves in a sort of blue and green dance,” Alma explains. “I have tried to get hold of these dancing forms mostly in mountain lakes and reveal them, composing different angles and perspective visions in diptychs.”
In her post-production setting, she joins two images to create an interplay between the near and the far, the intimate and the infinite but also to emphasise the experience of unforeseen points of view and perspectives. They balance around a slim white line, but patterns, lines, and colours recur in the composition. As a result, borders between reality and abstraction disappear and open a new horizon.
We think that water holds the gaze any time of year, summer or winter, as human beings we are drawn to it always, but for most of us it is too cold in the winter to dip in. And so, Alma´s images may provide the immersive experience we crave.
Click on the photos to see a larger image.
ALL PHOTOS © ALMA BIBOLOTTI
To see more of her photography visit Alma´s Instagram page and her website.
*Entropy: (1 – Physics) a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. (2) lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. (3)(in information theory) a logarithmic measure of the rate of transfer of information in a particular message or language.
(Source: Oxford Languages)
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