Bianca Salvo (\*1986) is an Italian artist currently living and working in Milan. She was awarded with an MA in Photography in 2012 from London College of Communication and previous to that, in 2010 she gained a BA in Visual Art & Photography from the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan.
Her work has been shown in Italy and abroad in several collective exhibitions: Shifting Focus (Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, 2016) Il ritratto (Galleria San Fedele, Milan) 97 Collettiva Giovani Artisti (Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice, 2013), Premio Francesco Fabbri per le Arti Contemporanee (Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Pieve di Soligo, 2013), The End (Miami Public Library, Miami 2012). She was recently shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award 2017 and for the Lucie Foundation Scholarship Grant 2017 dedicated to Emerging Artists. She also did the shortlist of The Athens Photofestival APhf:15, the Exposure Format Festival 2014, The Sproxton Photography Award in 2012, among others.
"Years from now people should be able to decide for themselves whether they want o go to Mars or if they prefer to stay earthbound. But let us not destroy the dream, simply because we do not wish to pursue it ourselves." - Edward Ezell.
The project The Universe Makers (2016-2017) is the result of a research on space imagery and is presented as an enquire on representative patterns and figurative models upon which our pop culture psyche bases and which still nowadays profoundly influence our attitudes toward the scientific and the outer space. Through this body of work Bianca Salvo wanted to explore the role photography, technology, science fiction and other medias have in producing evidences that still address our collective imagery towards believes, fake conceptions and constructed scenarios.
The future of civilization is certainly a matter of concern for humanity: from the appearance on TV of the First Man on the Moon in 1969, to the recent mission of Mars ONE promising to inaugurate a permanent human settlement on Mars, the possibility of life beyond Earth has established itself concretely in our minds.
Documents and visual records collected over the past years from Institutions and Research Centers have had a fundamental role in providing us with vivid depictions of the remote universe and realistic proofs of space exploration’s feasibility. On the other hands, science fiction massively contributed, in setting up our idea of an outward infinite galaxy, waiting for us to be explored, studied and colonized, suggesting situations in between the bizarre and the truth.
Using these assumptions as a starting point, Bianca collected documents and images questioning their informative role, besides, according to my practice, beginning a process of intervention of these records with the aim to challenge their authenticity. Establishing a parallel dialogue between ultimate proofs and fake results transforming factual evidences into unrealistic scenarios.
