BRUNO CATTANI
PLAYNG DREAMS

Bruno Cattani's photographs, allow us to enter into the world of children's poetry; starting from small things, children can transform the world, from objects that, while they play, become something else, they take on new meanings and come to life.
They allow us to see, hear the "sign" of the dream, the sign of the most profound life in the objects precious to children, therefore precious to each one of us. Piergiuseppina Fagandini

C-prints,  cm 30 x 30 edizione di 5 + 2 p.a. , cm 100 x 100 edizione di 3 + 1 p.a

“The first traces of man's poetic activity are in a child's play. The child at play behaves like a poet; he builds his own world, or rather, gives to his liking a new arrangement of the things of his world”
Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming”

Bruno Cattani's photographs, allow us to enter into the world of children's poetry; starting from small things, children can transform the world, from objects that, while they play, become something else, they take on new meanings and come to life.

This magic happens in every place where a child is playing, at home, at nursery school, in kindergarten, in a child psychotherapy room; it has always happened, in every century as evidenced by the toys in the Egyptian tombs of thousands of years ago and through the toy's contemporary industry and cartoon characters.
Cattani has managed to capture the toy-objects after they have been transformed by the play of children. Toys on their own, if not used, played with, have no life. They are all the same, they are concrete objects. But if a child has touched them, loved them, battered and transformed them, they live; the signs of emotions, fantasies they represented in the game, and that the children have lived through them, leave a trace you can see and "feel" in the color, the shape, the position in which they are left. This is the poetry of Cattani's photography; it captures and makes visible the enchantment of these traces. Traces of pleasure, joy, adventure, courage, but also of fear, sadness, anguish.

While playing children symbolically represent fantasies, fears, desires, experiences, and in doing so they use the same language and the same form of archaic expression that is phylogenetically acquired and well known in dreams. A child's play can be assimilated to the adult dream. The conscious and unconscious fantasies of the child and his mental representations, find in the game their mise-en-scene, just like the dream is the mise-en-scene of the adult unconscious fantasy. "We can fully  understand  what children express through the game if we look at it from the point of view of the method developed by Freud to reveal dreams" (M. Klein). The essential tool for child psychotherapy is the game, while the psychoanalysis of adults is based on dreams. It is thought to be impossible to photograph dreams. Cattani makes it possible to photograph children's dreams.

The toy, the act of playing, represent the transition between desire and reality, they guarantee its possibility. The transition process is played on the edge, a secret and individual margin where one experiences a non-hazardous, non-threatening solitude, a place where each one of us is a total master of himself, where we can live in freedom and in mystery, alone or in the company of someone. It is the matrix of the production of the human mind, of culture and art.
Cattani's photographs allow us to see, hear the "sign" of the dream, the sign of the most profound life in the objects precious to children, therefore precious to each one of us. Piergiuseppina Fagandini