|
|
PAST EXHIBITIONS:
Identità culturali (“Cultural Identities”)
is the felicitous continuation of the Firenze Fotografia Duemila Project,
extended this year to the city of Prato as well as Florence.
Two bodies, the Fondazione Studio Marangoni and Dryphoto Arte Contemporanea,
have pooled their knowledge and skills to offer an initiative that encompasses
significant and stimulating Italian and foreign experiences. The dual
intention of the initiative is to promote photography while actively participating
in the process of constructing a Tuscan contemporary art system, in particular
through the TRA ARTe contemporanea project promoted by the Regione Toscana.
One-man shows, collective exhibits, and special projects make up the mesh
that supports and revolves around Identità culturali. The initiative
is an occasion for research and for drawing attention to the complex of
spiritual experiences and artistic endeavors that make of each of us a
member of a group in a given historical period and in a precise environmental
context.
The declared aim of Identità culturali is to advance proposals
not for “classifying” works but rather for discussing various
themes and bringing others up for discussion, while moving through an
exhibit itinerary built especially to immerse the “traveler”
in a landscape where the meanings of words like “exotic” and
“foreign” are not exactly what we usually think.
The rigorously black-and-white reportage on Afghanistan by Paolo Woods,
the Englishman Simon Norfolk’s color vedute of the city of Kabul
after the bombings, the works by Andrea Abati entitled Gente del Corno
d’Africa, a journey through the Somalian and Eritrean communities
in Italy’s cities, the young photographer Michi Suzuchi’s
portraits of his foreign contemporaries who live in Florence, the passersby
made to pose by Marco Lanza, the legs and feet of prisoners by Alessandro
Mencarelli, and Christina Zück’s spa bathers recount a universe
of multiethnicities that by now have penetrated and inhabit — without
distinction — many of the world’s spaces.
One “common” characteristic is the peculiarity of each of
the artistic itineraries of the selected authors: each presents his/her
own expressive language even when dealing with the so-called “social”
themes. Take, for example, the subtle irony of Peter Granser’s story
of Sun City, the 1960’s Arizona development for senior citizens,
or Renate Aller’s portraits of the inhabitants of TriBeCa after
September 11th.
Photography is the language that perhaps best corresponds to our times,
and in fact, it was in this context that the artists were chosen. Artists
who use photography in their work either as their exclusive instrument
or as an occasional tool, but always to the hilt for the myriad expressive
openings it offers.
And so we have intimate, subjective reflection in Charles Loverme’s
reworking of old photographs of ceramics on tombs; an individual vision
in Osvaldo Sanviti’s homely color shots; a tool of memory in the
small but significative documentary nucleus donated by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini
to the Archivio Contemporaneo “A. Bonsanti” of the Gabinetto
Vieusseux in 1978 — 41 splendid photographic portraits, by Pozzi-Bellini
himself, of Italian and foreign intellectuals; and collective experience
in Les Dogons par les Dogons, by Antonin Potoski, which shows the photographs
taken by seven young Dogons with Potoski’s camera in the five weeks
he spent in the villages of the Bandiagara plateau.
At times, the relationship with the host space characterizes the exhibit,
as happens in the installation by Margherita Verdi — vestiges of
the sphinxes and lions of the Hittite temple of Ain Darah at the border
of Syria and Turkey, on large canvas panels — designed and produced
especially for the Salone degli Scheletri of Florence’s Museo di
Storia Naturale della Specola. In other cases (Giacomo Costa, Carlos Motta,
and Leta Peer), the artists represent the identity and the curatorial
stance of the galleries that exhibit their works.
Identità culturali is a provocation, because it presupposes an
attentive visitor — one capable of grasping the differences and
the shadings, at times macroscopic and at others very very subtle, and
of appreciating the work of those whose intention it is to promote local
authors as well as others. In fact, together with works by other Tuscans,
there is also an anthological exhibit of the opus of the Florentine photographer
Carlo Cantini, a tribute to his decades of work.
The proposals selected for the city of Prato privilege
mainly works by young artists, works that create synergies and add to
projects already operative in the territory.
At the Archivio Fotografico Toscano, the young Tuscan Andreas Calamandrei
is showing fragments of a personal reflection on views of everyday landscapes
in movement. As part of the Officina Giovani project at the Cantieri Culturali
Ex Macelli, a space open to young artists from 18 to 35, we find Trust.
Adam Bloomberg and Oliver Chanarin, the current Creative Directors of
COLORS, the magazine published by the Benetton Research and Development
Centre, propose the theme of . . . “trust” in a series of
portraits of people in states of utter abandonment.
Jananne Al-Ani and Zineb Sedira, both of whom live in London, take their
femininity as the starting point for their inquiries into the dualities
of the cultures in which they grew up.
Jananne Al-Ani, an artist born in Kirkuk in Iraq, felt the need to address
the theme of the Gulf War and to call into play the portraits of the women
in her family.
Zineb Sedira, born in Paris of Algerian parents, denounces nothing but
asks many questions. For example, about the use of the veil as a form
of censure and self-censure — and as a symbol of cultural identity,
since in her works it is used as a device for reproducing the image of
the human figure.
The decision to exhibit the works of these artists in Prato was not fortuitous.
Since 1995 the city has been hosting the "I luoghi della vita"
European Award for women photographers, with the active support of the
provincial government of Prato.
Vittoria Ciolini
|
 |
|
 |
PHOTOGRAPHS
(click to enlarge) |
|
|
