Marilisa Cosello COMPLEANNO (BIRTHDAY)

Marilisa Cosello believes that although society often depicts people as having simplifi ed identities, we are much more complex, with many identities living inside of us. In her series “Compleanno (Birthday),” she brings fi ve versions of herself to life in photographs and collages that resemble diaries. She calls them the Bride, the Lover, the Man, the Bourgeois Woman and the Kids. “The characters are a projection of myself,” she says. “Some of the images in the series are self-portraits, some depict people who look like me, some are images that I pretend to be from my past and some represent my every day.”

Cosello, who lives in Italy, started out in photojournalism before devoting herself full time to making art. “Our version of reality is always shaped by who we are,” she says of deciding to investigate the many sides of her persona. Creating “Compleanno” took a full year. Cosello kept a diary for each one of her characters that numbered in the hundreds of pages—the series envisions the moment when they all meet for the fi rst time.

Currently the work is an artist book, but Cosello would like to have it published; it has also been shown in Paris at Central DUPON in 2015, and at the Milano Photofestival in 2016. “When people see the work, they always try to identify themselves in one of the characters,” she says. “It’s amazing, the way people try to fi nd a connection. The work is very personal, but in this way, it becomes collective.”

—Brienne Walsh

Photos © Marilisa Cosello marilisacosello.com