Valerio Polici

Ergo Sum

[ EPF 2014 FINALIST ]

ESSAY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT

“My reality is bigger than your dreams are” (Porer 031 crew. Milan 2011)

Probably everything starts from the need of escaping for a while from boredom, pain, personal limitation.

I’ve known for the first time the writer’s world around my twelve year old, immediately fascinated for all of the mystery and the indefiniteness that enveloped it. His protagonists were my idols: superheroes with covered faces of a clandestine world. Of them you only knew names and legends.

I’ve joined this community that slowly absorbed every energy, every emotion, prioritizing above everything else.
Transforming my life in a kind of very adventurous viedo-game, graffiti answered to that desire of feeling special that everybody has: dark burrows, stalks, deactivate sensors and cameras, military organization, breathe mixed up with the ones running at your side. A nocturnal odyssey that arises in the intestinal spaces of the metropolis, where fear become consolatory.

 

 

Their deeds take shape in the daytime through unintelligible signs that rewrite the urban aesthetics, under the distracted gazes of the passer-by. Cities appear as diaries of several small stories of invisibilities, a redemption from anonymity to obtain the own “fifteen minutes of fame”.

In the last three years I’ve followed different groups of writers between Europe and Argentina, trying to give to the viewers the taste of those sensations that trap lots of kids in this limbo.

Among intrusions, climbing, infinite running, darkness and a lot of adrenaline, this is the tale of our escape.

 

 

Bio

Valerio Polici was born in Rome in 1984.
From 2006 to 2009 he studied advertising at Lumsa university in Rome, making one year exchange studies in Lisbon at I.S.C.E.M. University, and working in an advertising agency for three months.
In 2011 he studied photography at I.S.F.C.I. school in Rome. Than he followed a masterclass in Padua with Enrico Bossan (head of photography department at Fabrica), and a workshop with Paolo Pellegrin.
From 2012 to 2013 he was assistant photographer for Giovanni Cocco.
His first publication was in 2012 for the Italian newspaper “L’Unità” about housing emergency. His first reportage assignment was in 2014 for the Italian magazine “L’Espresso” about an experimental art gallery in a squatting in Rome.
From 2011 to 2014, he’s been working on a project about the human need of escape, through the community of graffiti writers, featured on: B.J.P. , Newsweek online, Fk, Private, among others.
He’s currently working on a new project about Portuguese culture.