Pommefritz (Massimiliano Boschini and Mauro Manuini) is an artistic group born since the beginning of 2004 thanks to Mauro Manuini and Massimiliano Boschini, two Italian photographers eager to challenge themselves and share their experiences with their cameras. Their intent is to escape from both classical messages and means of photography. They realize it through a new interpretation of uncommon settings such as old Italian cottages, deserted and neglected places where colours are distorted and corrupted with a surrealist and dreamlike effect.

They like to work with the analogical and the cross processing technique. Since their beginning, they have been hosted at the Biennial Exhibitions in Hong Kong and Arad (Rumania), at the City Hide Project in Rome (2005, Italy), at the International Festival of Photography of Rome (2007, Italy), at the International Festival of Photography in Bangladesh (2006), at the Biennial of Cuenca (2007, Ecuador).

We're all healthy carriers of insanity. We're supposed to have full possession of our mental faculty but our brain could potentially and suddenly detonate. This summer daily chronicles witnesses the existence of these wandering mines. "Fathers kills wife and children, then commits suicide". The demarcation line which separates us from this kind of occurrences is extremely thin.

We, Massimiliano Boschini and Mauro Manuini, We don't know what insanity is, but I do know that I could descend into it every single day. A false perception, a hallucination, a mystical vision, where is the difference? In one case, you perk up, in the other case too, but in the last case you believe in it. And which is the remedy? In the first case, after seeing your beloved into a stranger woman you recover; in the other case, after seeing her in the vacuum you mistake the dream for reality and only thanks to some psychotropic drugs you recover; in the third case you don't recover because, in the luckiest of cases, you receive social consensus but if you don't, you fall into depression. Insanity is a product of imagination, which is our only resource for inventing a world when this one becomes unbearable. And today the bearable limits are effectively shrinking. While the rest of the world starves to death or dies of thirst and disease, we'll die of insanity, mistaking it for normality, or better still, for civilization. Because it is typical of our civilization not having time for a brief and intense look to our children, for a warm look to those we live with, we are only capable of giving careful and opportunistic looks to those who offer us acknowledgments and emancipation in the workplace, which has become the foremost place of our identity. If power is not insanity, if money is not insanity, if sex is not insanity, what else is left to insanity if not only the existential decay, and then the economic and finally the social one? Let's say it: in this world insanity is the social alienation of those who, being unproductive or incapable of staying in this world, invent other worlds in order to survive. Worlds that, if artistic, are acknowledged as art and poetry, as gentle insanity; but when they lack of acknowledged expressive means, they are ranked as insanity to the great joy of pharmaceutical industries and for that calmness that everyone finds in a proper definition.

We, Massimiliano Boschini and Mauro Manuini, maker of "artistic" worlds, We offer you a look into our gentle insanities. Here attached you'll find my self-timers. They immortalize me within these parallel universes, created as antidote to the "real" world and to the so-called "normality". Every picture is a map which allows me to deal with them. Inspired by the texts of the philosopher Flusser Vìlém, who said: "a real photographer rediscovers the same scenes in ways, which are always very different", so I go on finding myself every time in different places. Following Noah Kalina's exhibition at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, which was ironically entitled "We're all photographers Now", we could go further and change it into the motto "Kindly, we're all a little bit insane now" Up with gentle insanity!

Catalogues and books are available from this exhibition. For more information email director@sellarsprojectspace.com.