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With the collaboration of Ilaria Tariello
The first clinical descriptions of the Cabin Fever syndrome date back to 1900, during the California Gold Rush in the United States. Gold-hunters were forced to spend entire months inside a cabin, and this isolation soon led to a series of side-effects: refusal to return to civilization, distrust of others, memory loss, stress and anxiety. The symptom picture of Cabin Fever is somehow linked to the current post-lockdown situation at the end of 2020, with individuals around the world suffering from a similar syndrome as the one experienced by gold seekers. The disorder is faced both in an allegorical key and by drawing on pre-existing images and creating them from scratch. Following the trail that conceptually led me to America between the 19th and 20th centuries, the project presents some screenshots and texts taken from Charlie Chaplin's film "The Gold Rush" (1925), subsequently colored with a program which, based on “deep learning”, automatically attributes colors to black and white photographs, mimicking what happened in the process of hand coloring pictures before the arrival of color.

In addition to this, some still-lifes of polyurethane agglomerates evoke, even in the modes of representation, those gold nuggets that motivated the extreme efforts of the adventurers of the Gold Rush.
Welcome Stranger is simultaneously the name of the largest gold nugget ever found, the title of this work and a desire, particularly that of encountering others without fear.

Refocus. Archivio visivo della pandemia, Triennale di Milano, Milano, 2021