My First Dream by Diego Brambilla

“Why My First Dream? Dreams are the moment where conscious and unconscious come together mixing imagination with real memories. It’s my first dream because I wanted to evocate a primordial desire, such as the will/wish of exploration. So an exploration between imagination and reality.”

“We are living in a world with a never ending attitude to staged and restaged experiences. Happiness, conflicts, emotions, dystopic realities are continuously represented. It often happens that the staging becomes more important than the reality.

My First Dream has its roots exactly when the staging attitude becomes more important than reality.

My work balances on the edge between real and unreal, forged and original. I deliberately intended to trick the viewer using a cinematographic language, dragging the viewer in an obscure place, hiding the horizon or carefully choosing a location.

Except for a few astronauts on the Moon and some pictures from space probes we don’t have any experience about other planets. But we all have a quite precise idea of how they should look. We are so deeply influenced by more than 50 years of popular movies that we can barely differentiate in our mind what comes from real documents and what is a representation. My aim was raising some questions about this process and engage the viewer with a series of an impossible picture that is, for a moment, experienced as original.”

“My process involves DIY and sculpture. Everything you see in the photos is made by me, adapting, reusing, or creating from scratch. The space-suit, for example, has been created with a helmet coming from a Chinese vintage pilot suit. On both sides of the helmet, I added two lights to give the idea of a space helmet. The suit is a modification of a dry suit from the British army. I tend to use everything that is cheap and easy to find, such as plastic, glue, wood, etc.”

“My First Dream is also about emotions and intimacy, about loneliness and the fear to be alone and forgotten. The harshness of the environment and the absence of the horizon intend to enhance exactly that feeling. However with my pictures I didn’t want to make a statement if humans belong or not to space. I think I’m more interested in representing a human condition more than the real possibility of a space travel.

I have put some clues in my pictures but I left on purpose the contradiction unresolved. There are gaps between what is in the pictures and its interpretation, I left it to the audience to make up their story. It’s more interesting for me to raise questions than to give answers.”

“Obviously one of the strongest influence in my work are sci-fi movies. I spent a lot of time watching everything was made in the sci-fi genre. I started clearly from the master, Mélies. I fed with movies from the 60’, such as Babarella, Forbidden Planet, The dark side of the moon, La Jétee . But I’m not nostalgic, I tend to be agnostic when it comes to movies, so I watched every movie from every age, such as 2001: a Space Odyssey, Moon, Gravity, Alien, District 9.”

“Eventually for me sci-fi is first of all a language used to find a way to communicate on a certain level. On that level where fantasy and reality tend to mix. It’s the same blurry word to describe, where we as viewers lost the sense of what is fake and what is original.”

Thanks for reading this interview with London-based photographer Diego Brambilla.

To see more of Diego’s work visit his Instagram or Website.

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Originally published on Art Narratives