Roberta Biondi investigates traveling, freedom and intimacy
"Born in Sardinia in the year when New Order's song True Faith was released, she spent her life wandering through different places and looking for somewhere to call home. She fell in love with analog photography at the age of 17 by randomly using an old camera, and since then photography has been her longest love story. She now lives in Barcelona, where she explores experimental photographic techniques and lets herself be inspired by this messy city. She works with her beloved Nikon FM2 and with the expired film rolls that she finds during her trips."
See more of Roberta's work on instagram at @_robertabi
A/A: What attracts you to alternative processing?
RB: Alternative and experimental processes are a way to express myself by using more than the image itself. It allows me to explore, in depth, the feelings that I want to transmit with my photographs, and it's also a way to discover new techniques and get constant inspiration without getting used to the same processes all the time. I'm a very curious person, and many times I've been asking myself what I could do with an image in front of my eyes, more than taking a photo of it. That's how I started experimenting: from superposing more images through multiple exposures, to burning some negatives, from souping my film to sewing on a printed photo, all the experiments that I've made allowed me to express myself in a more complete way.
A/A: What inspires you?
RB: I'm mostly inspired by stories and places. What surrounds me, even the most simple thing or situation, can easily become a source of inspiration and something worth looking at closely. I'm also inspired by the unknown of the results that a photographic experiment can give. It could be a double exposure, a film swap, the colours of an expired film, or the result of a film soup. Shooting film is a constant inspiration for me, due to its uncertainty, it's rituals, its intensity.
A/A: Do you find your work has a theme?
RB: All my shots tell some personal stories about me or about the people and places that I get to know during my life. Most of the series I've worked on are ongoing tales about something that entered in my life at a certain point, leaving me something that was worth telling. I dedicated many works and series to the places that have been important in my life, often melting them into each other through film swaps with myself, shooting the film in two different places at a distance of years from each other. I can say that my work is mostly autobiographical, but I'm working on focusing on other people's stories as well, it's one of my future projects.