"Sembra poco" — it seems like nothing. A deceptive assertion. It is the everyday language that normalises loss, waste, the residual. But it is also the starting point from which Simone Matti builds a reflection on food waste, treated not as a statistic, but as a gesture of care, collection and memory.
Through the apparent lightness of the photographic act — a practice that becomes archive, ritual and confession — Matti composes a series of images situated between the pictorial still life and the aesthetics of food photography, consciously subverting its codes and conventions. Food, which in Baroque painting served as an allegory of transience and bourgeois desire, has today become, in images, a cosmetic product for the digital economy.
In this shift, commercial photography has inherited the visual strategies of seventeenth-century painting, with its illusionistic artifices — startling to discover that today the professional figure of the Food Stylist is devoted to curating the aesthetics of food to make it visually appealing, often using inedible materials to simulate freshness, cooking or abundance — with a deliberate intention to induce consumption and, consequently, waste. Matti intervenes on the images with a simple gesture: the "cmd+I" command in Photoshop. A technical tool that becomes a symbolic act, where inverting is already a way of subverting: subverting visual codes, subverting the aesthetics of consumption, subverting the insidious narrative of food as a desirable object.
The captions are placed alongside the images like titles of still lifes. In this form they evoke museum labels, but here, on the contrary, they do not ennoble: each word reveals a conflicted relationship with what we eat, contributing to the creation of a domestic cosmology of waste.
If we feel implicated, it is only because we are confronted with our own contradictions — an inevitable cognitive dissonance in systems that normalise waste and violence, given that what we define as "food" is often life, non-human intelligences reduced to mere objects of consumption. In reality, Matti points the finger exclusively at himself, but from this gesture of self-reflection emerges the aspiration to encourage a collective ethical practice post tempus, capable of challenging, albeit belatedly, not only the culture of waste, but also the speciesist and anthropocentric hierarchies that underlie it.
As a whole, the project offers itself as a critical tool that refuses a rhetoric of guilt, in favour of an ethics of responsibility. A work that appears light, yet acts like a drop, capable of cleaving the surface of our consciousness.
Silvia Bigi
