A postcard from Bratislava

Publish date 08-04-2022

by Luca Periotto

This cheerful scene depicts a small terrace overlooking the Danube in Bratislava, where there is a group of young gymnast athletes from Ukraine who had just taken a selfie and then immediately shared it with friends and family. The act itself is a common scene, an obligatory ritual for any contemporary tourist. I waited a few moments, reflecting on their potential photographic result: that is, how would it appear to the recipient? Would there be room for a fragment of Bratislava? I imagined that their faces and grimaces had covered, compromising their vision, most of the real subject, the real point of interest, that is, the river or the light.

So this is how the new digital postcards telegramnate and whatsappate are now painting a new Atlas where the subjects that are supposed to represent landscapes, panoramas, they have been de-classified as wallpaper, leaving in evidence the foreground only the banality of endlessly repeated grimaces of our faces without spontaneity.
During an epochal cycle that lasted about seventy years the "postcard" object was able to condense senses, functions and meanings in multilayer, a real and material collectible object among our things to be kept in a watertight drawer for its uniqueness and evocative capacity.

Now in common use supplanted by social networks, few reflect on the fact that thanks to this communication tool, a real collective atlas of all the places on planet Earth has been created, a paper planisphere made of all 10x15cm windows in the world. If the "postcard" represented the modesty of feelings, virtual postcards through sharing trivialize them.
Those few that remain are almost always ignored, due to the laziness of investing a few minutes to write, since it is more comfortable to type. Of course, another thing than writing.


© Luca Periotto 2022
NP January 2022

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