Irene Ferri - No Other Country but America
There is no other place in the world that has its own dream for sale. There is no Italian dream or Thai dream or Chilean dream: there is only the American dream. The whole world looks up to this specific dream.
It's in the USA's flag in whose sacred stars we see a sky of infinite possibilities. We see it until, at some point, a point we cannot foresee or welcome, we see nothing more. And the dream becomes first confusion, then disillusionment, and finally - if one is lucky enough not to have in the meantime completely compromised the soul to buy that sinister dream - detachment. And thus, perhaps, salvation.
Ferri's American story of fascination and awareness is told through the photographs of No Other Country but America, a project that collects 10 years of observation and experience on the ground. In 2013 Ferri moved to Los Angeles to study Cinematography at UCLA University. The more time passes, the less for Ferri things stay into place, like an immense plastic swordfish stranded above soda fridges.
Ferri has seen what one often does not want to see, and once seen, cannot unsee.
She leaves Los Angeles and the United States but, unable to make a final farewell, continues to explore them from other perspectives, to look at them - even - from the distance of her new homes in the world, to try to resolve elsewhere a conflict that she nevertheless still nurtures within herself. For this is the most authentic legacy of the American dream today: to stop believing in it, at some point. And yet continue to relive it.
No Other Country but America is the best contemporary visual representation of what writer Bret Easton Ellis had called, speaking of Los Angeles and the United States, "gleaming nihilism."
