MACULA is an exploration of the correlation between distorted vision and distorted perception, Age-Macular Degeneration and the fictive visual perceptions of the Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
The whole research is based on an archive of 7 years of voice notes recordings of the artist’s mother, diagnosed with Age-Macular Degeneration in 2002 and experiencing fictive visual perceptions since 2012.
Through her voice diary, she describes her experience of what it means to live into a world made of increasing darkness, where she can’t tell the difference between what is real - and exists - and what is an hallucination - and doesn’t exist.
Her first-person voice notes inspired the whole project.
Her personal experience as the description of a much larger experience, shared by many.

MACULA is an exploration of the correlation between distorted vision and distorted perception, Age-Macular Degeneration and the fictive visual perceptions of the Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
The whole research is based on an archive of 7 years of voice notes recordings of the artist’s mother, diagnosed with Age-Macular Degeneration in 2002 and experiencing fictive visual perceptions since 2012.
Through her voice diary, she describes her experience of what it means to live into a world made of increasing darkness, where she can’t tell the difference between what is real - and exists - and what is an hallucination - and doesn’t exist.
Her first-person voice notes inspired the whole project.
Her personal experience as the description of a much larger experience, shared by many.

The Theater is in the Mind is part of MACULA developed at the AAR American Academy in Rome (IT) as part of the Tiffany & Co. Italian Fellowship in 2018.
The work took shape of a site specific exhibition in the atelier space, visualizing effects of hypo-vision, visual confusion and fictive perceptions as communicated by patients who suffer from AgeMacular Degeneration and Charles Bonnet Syndrome visual hallucinations.

In 2018 FZ received a grant from Embassy and Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Italy for the production of a short film about MACULA, his ongoing artistic research around distorted vision and distorted perception, inspired by the effects of Age-Macular Degeneration and the fictive visual perceptions of the Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
MACULA / The Theater is in The Mind (2019) has been shot at the AAR American Academy in Rome (IT) during his months of residency as Tiffany & Co. Italian Fellow.
The film has been presented for as World Premiere at LFF 2019 - Lago Film Fest, International Festival of Independent cinema in Treviso (IT).
MACULA / The Theater is in The Mind was nominated for the award Best Original Sountrack and Veneto Region Special Prize.

Chinese Whispers is an ongoing series of paintings and part of the MACULA Collection, inspired by narrations of the fictive visual perceptions and voice recordings of FZ’s mother.
The collection reflects on the 'interpretation' and ‘translation’ of a person’s perceptions and mark a journey from sensation, to perception, to language, to interpretation, to translation, to visual representation.
The paintings are figurative/abstract representations of immaterial perceptions, filtered through FZ’s own visual aesthetics.
Half way between very tactile paintings and digital image making,
they use colors (sometimes dull, sometimes highly contrasted) which seem to be flat and artificial, almost digitally printed, when approached from afar.
Analysing the visual structure of the painting the viewer notice its tactile nature, the thick layers of the shapes meticulously painted one on top of each other using acrylic pigments.
There is a contrast and a dialogue between the 'digital' aesthetic of the painting (which has been conceived using image editing softwares) and the 'tactile' way it's paint has been laid down, and the 'human' nature of the volatile perception it takes inspiration from.
Colors overlay into fictive transparencies connecting with the very nature of these visual perceptions, described as vibrating and superimposed on normal sight.