Ludovico Desideri

Year of birth: 1993.
Where do you live: Poggio Moiano (RI), Italy.
Your education: Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at University of Turin.
Describe your art in three words: Oniric, Symbolic and Poetic.
Your discipline: Filmmaking, digital and analogue collage, photography.
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Could you tell us about your journey into visual anthropology and what inspired you to pursue this field?  

During my study in Turin, I had the opportunity to cultivate my passion for cinema by attending the university’s video-ethnographic laboratory. From this experience, the idea was born to create my first documentary, “Natura viva, natura morta” dedicated to the fragile beauty of the infiorata of Poggio Moiano. Infiorata is a Catholic tradition from a pre-industrial past. It consists of creating floral mosaics on the ground that reproduce images of saints and symbols of Christianity along the main streets of the village. My adventure within popular traditions is continuing with research on the sword dance in northern Italy, an ancient ritual linked to the fertility of the land. What has always fascinated me about cultural anthropology is the possibility of knowing what moves the spirit and imagination of other people, belonging to different cultures and epochs. Every culture has its own language, imagery, and mythology that allow people to understand and imagine the world. Through my research, I have tried to give a voice to these different narratives, using the language of film. It often allows better than writing to restore the emotional and sensory universe in which a culture is immersed.  

How has growing up in Rieti, Italy, influenced your artistic perspective and creative process?  

My first source of inspiration was the village where I grew up, Poggio Moiano, near Rieti, in the heart of the Alta Sabina, a land of small hills on which ancient stone villages are nestled. I still have vivid memories of long walks in the oldest part of the village, a place born at the base of a hill and now almost entirely abandoned. It is a poor place, almost as if it is a natural extension of the nature in which it is immersed. For me, it was the place where stories of witches and werewolves, which I had heard from the elderly, came to life. Around the village, I came into contact with another inspiring muse: nature. Wild and spectacular, every season has its own colors, scents, and sounds that captured my senses and imagination. Other sources of inspiration include films, cartoons, museums, and video games. Together with a friend, we had fun imagining our village as the backdrop for the adventures we saw in video games or creating new stories, setting them right in the streets and landscapes of Poggio Moiano.  

Ludovico Desideri | The first earth | 2024

Your documentary “Natura viva, natura morta” received an honorable mention at the Cefalù Film Festival. What was the inspiration behind this project, and what did you hope to convey through it?  

The inspiration for “Natura viva, natura morta” comes from my deep-rooted passion for the flower carpet festival in Poggio Moiano, a tradition that has been an integral part of my life since childhood. As mentioned, this festival takes place on the last weekend of June. It involves creating stunning floral mosaics along the town’s main streets using fresh or dried flowers. It could be said that the ritual of the flower carpet festival unfolds over the entire year, beginning with the conception of the work, which determines the variety of flowers. During the celebration, the flower artists compose artworks by placing flowers on the ground, following the outline of a sketch drawn on the ground. As a child, I was enchanted by the sight of the town decorated with colors, sounds, and fragrances, thanks to the work of the flower carpet makers, who spent hours carefully arranging each petal. It almost seemed as if the town was a magic place, and I felt transported to another dimension, perhaps a dream. I have tried to recreate this atmosphere, to lead the viewer into the rhythmic and poetic force of the tradition. It is a celebration that effectively evokes the human journey, from its blossoming in childhood to its rapid fading in old age.  

You work across different mediums, including photography, collage, and film. How do these mediums complement each other in expressing your artistic vision?  

I find it stimulating to work with different expressive mediums and to allow myself the time to immerse in the creative process. As David Lynch suggests, ideas don’t “come” but are “caught,” like fish swimming in the deep ocean: the unconscious. Each artistic medium represents, in other words, a different place to fish. When I make collages, I catch fish towards the dreamlike world, exploring the deepest parts of the psyche. My photographs, on the other hand, arise from a direct dialogue with the sensible world: I start from the reality that surrounds me, trying to bring out what it evokes in me. With cinema, I change register: as a visual anthropologist, I try to combine a scientific approach with a poetic one, aware that truth resides more in poetry than in a presumed objectivity that does not exist. These languages integrate with each other, allowing me to explore different aspects of my artistic vision.  

Ludovico Desideri | Underwater Cathedrals | 2024

Can you share the creative process behind your digital and analog collages? How do you decide on the themes or elements to include?  

I try to carefully arrange each element, as a set designer would prepare a theatrical stage. This stage, like the world and the places we pass through every day, seems subject to an alchemical process, in which each element interacts and relates to the others, giving life to something unique. Walking in a forest, for example, we perceive the wind rustling the leaves, the scent of the trees, the sunlight illuminating the flowers, making them shine. All these elements combine with each other to create a particular atmosphere. The same happens in the artistic process: I try to balance colors, shapes, and symbols to obtain the image I am looking for, guided more by the emotions and sensations I want to evoke rather than by a defined theme. Dealing mainly with landscapes, I first look for perspective elements that give depth to the collages, a “platform” where I can set the story. I generally try to create collage with a painterly effect, combining photographs with painting and other graphic elements to create dreamlike and surreal atmospheres. Nature, with its cycles and mysteries, is one of my greatest sources of inspiration, and through it, I explore universal themes such as birth, death, and transformation.  

Your work often explores themes of nature and its relationship with human imagination. What drives this focus in your art?  

As a child, my father took me into nature often, and those places, with all their vitality and mutability, became the protagonists of my photographs. Our culture has taught us to admire the great monuments of cities, which, however imposing, remain immutable, always the same. Walking in a forest, on the other hand, you discover something completely different: a living place, which changes with the seasons, revealing new faces and new stories every time. This deep connection with nature has shaped my vision of the world, which has never been marked by modern disenchantment. The spiritual connection I have with the natural world is manifested in my creations, where I rework fragments of lived experiences, intertwining them with the images and symbols that emerge from my unconscious, including dreams I have had. Moreover, I happen to experiment with what I find. Once, while walking near a cave, inspired by the landscape, I created a giant circle of stones with a monolith in the center. Some time later, I learned that someone believed the circle was the work of primitive men.  

Ludovico Desideri | Walking City | 2024

How does your background in cinema influence your approach to photography and collage-making?  

The technique of collage is similar to film editing because it is an assembly of images that contribute to composing a work. Secondly, by mainly creating landscapes, I work like a set designer who has to set up a film set. Certainly, the experience with cinema has led me to study the composition of images well and how to arrange elements in space in both photographs and collages. In films, I cannot reproduce what I can do with collages, but it would be interesting if one day my films resembled my collages more.