Citytellers is a trilogy of films projected last October at MADRE (Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples), in collaboration with the Umberto Di Marino gallery. The work represents the most complete result of Jodice's reflections about the contemporary geopolitical scene, not just in terms of his conceptual assumptions but also in terms of the use of the media and the possibilities of access they currently offer art. The photos at the Galleria Umberto Di Marino therefore constitute a further formal choice which is complementary to the video project, transferring discarded ideas and unexplored grey areas to film. The images translate certain key scenes, emphasising a disorientation of perception, which leads us to read between the lines of the visual grammar in order to check the reliability of the contents. The technical expedients encourage a conception of photography that does not impose a single perspective but leaves part of the interpretation to the observer.
Aral brings to the attention of everyone, in striking fashion, the enormous consequences of the greatest ecological catastrophe of all time, caused by the political decision of the former Soviet Union to divert the water of Lake Aral to encourage cotton cultivation. The area, which has almost completely turned to desert, is one of the most polluted in the world: the few survivors are continuously exposed to physical risk and lack any means of subsistence, representing a sort of "archaeology of humanity".
Saõ Paulo, which belongs to the Tate Modern collection, was presented at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 2006 and shown on prime time TV in Brazil. It proved a fundamental contribution to identifying the flows of humanity underlying the social organisation of a metropolis with extreme social situations; in these cases, institutions play a secondary role with respect to the forms of self-regulation of the local communities.
Dubai represents the evidence of the failure of an extreme capitalistic system, which has exploited the work force made up of Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalese and Bangladeshis and reduced it to slavery (testified by the torture of the child-jockeys for the camel races); the enormous block of real estate which has created in the desert is now in serious state of crisis due to the unsustainable nature of its unchecked expansion. It is both a visual and epistemological journey designed to discover new worlds and the different levels of perception and interpretation at which they are represented.
