Gaia Squarci (Italy): Broken Screen
Gallery offline – updating soon
“When you’re losing sight, the world starts to appear fragmented, like through a broken screen. Then you stop understanding where light comes from.” – Dale Layne
The blind live in a sighted world. They function in a system constructed on the rules of seeing. Many of them could once see, but after going blind they were forced to reinvent themselves, and their quality of life became deeply affected by disability law, support in the private sphere, and the level of awareness in the society around them.
I asked them to guide me into their lives. I’m interested in the disconnect between the concept of blindness as a metaphor and its reality. Stripped of its mysterious aura, the blindness of daily life, the one that’s not heard of in the words of a song, often turns out to be disquieting, and kept at a distance.
This project has become a way for me to explore our universal needs. I imagine myself in the position of someone who turned blind, forced to reinvent my relationship to the world after years of a sighted life.
When filtered through blindness, the core questions of identity, love and independence feel to me even more resonant.