As he does every year at the end of December, Marco Saroldi is getting ready to send his 38th greeting card to a circle of family, friends and acquaintances who eagerly await each new creation and collect them with fervour. It all began as a game almost 40 years ago. A young photographer from Turin, bored with the idea of having to call family and friends for the never-ending chore of New Year's greetings, decided to take a photo of himself with his girlfriend and send it as a greeting card. It would be the first self-portrait in a series that would span his entire life, different eras and even continents, since after 2015, when Marco moved to Auroville, the wishes would travel from India to the West and not the other way round anymore. The game of self-portraiture is gradually becoming less self-referential and more sophisticated. Marco developed a passion for this pastime, which over time turned into a real project. The figure of the photographer becomes a mirror of time, a punching bag, an identikit for the traveller of our time, which he stages with aplomb, humour and ferocity. Nothing can escape his merciless gaze, from our technological and consumerist manias to the socio-political blunders of our governments, from ecological concerns to the catastrophic and ridiculous triumph of human individualism, from cloning to the mafia. He hijacks religious and advertising icons - Nike, Che Guevara, Botticelli, United Colors of Benetton - to create his own personal theatre, sometimes featuring his own family and friends. A magic lantern in the beam of which Marco Saroldi's self-portraits scroll past, projections of us, his contemporaries, captured in our ironic and slightly desperate essence.

Marco Saroldi was born in Turin, Italy, in 1957. After a two year stint at university, Marco left his studies and took on a part-time job in order to cultivate his passion for photography. In 1983 he became a professional photographer and opened a photography studio dedicated mainly to industrial and architectural photography. Parallel to his professional photography work, Marco Saroldi has also dedicated himself to creative research in the field of images which lead him to exhibit in galleries both in Italy and abroad. Some of his photographs are part of public and private international collections, such as the National Library of France in Paris, Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, and Modern Art Museum of Yokohama, to name a few. Since 2015, Marco lives and works in Auroville