THE IMAGE HUNTER the Journey (2015 )
‘What drives a man to dedicate his life to pursue his obsession for hunting images? ’
This was the fundamental question ‘The Image Hunter’ sought to answer during a three-month journey through America. ‘The Image Hunter’ was a more than twenty-city, self-financed road trip to retrace and rediscover the America that John James Audubon traversed in the making of The Birds of America.
From late July to late October 2015, the Roman artist Hitnes traveled along Audubon’s exploratory paths from the 1800s, delving into the current state of the birds he documented and attempting to recreate in three months that which took Audubon thirty years.
The remains of this epic piece of performance art are the sketches and materials gathered – live matter and photographic – in the contemporary American wilderness, as well as the 15 public murals painted during Hitnes’ brief emergences from the wild into modern American urban capitals. This material will then be revealed to the public via an exhibition in an American museum.THE IMAGE HUNTER the Exhibition.
Video documentation by filmmaker Giacomo Agnetti, which captures the sites, sounds, and spirits encountered along the way will be turned into a documentary feature scheduled for release in 2018: THE IMAGE HUNTER the Film.
