In parallel with the exhibition dedicated to Dorothea Lange, from July 19 – October 8, 2023, CAMERA offers the collective FUTURES 2023: New Narratives in the Project Room, curated by Giangavino Pazzola, curator and coordinator of research projects at CAMERA.
The exhibition itinerary includes six projects by as many artists selected for the European program for the promotion and enhancement of emerging talents FUTURES Photography, in which CAMERA represents Italy. Through the photographs taken by Andrea Camiolo (Leonforte, 1998), Nicola Di Giorgio (Palermo, 1994), Zoe Natale Mannella (London, 1997), Eleonora Roaro (Varese, 1989), Sara Scanderebech (Nardò, 1985), Alex Zoboli ( Guastalla, 1990) the exhibition explores the theme of the visual representation of contemporaneity in over 50 shots.
Drawing on different photographic creation practices, from those of reusing images and archive materials to those involving the use of software and new technologies, the projects presented investigate not only the uses and customs of today’s society, but also new trends that cross the panorama of contemporary photography. Which are the new ways of narrating and reading the world through photography? What can we glimpse on the horizon thanks to them? These are some of the questions photographers have asked themselves in their visual research.
In For a possible landscape (2020), Andrea Camiolo analyzes the Sicilian hilly territory, restoring various possible declinations of it. From the satellite image to the screenshot of the source code of a digital file, from a scan of a negative to the still life of small stones, each image reveals a place that is always different and at the same time identical, thus highlighting the possibilities and limits of photography in documenting reality. These themes return in the work Concrete (2020 – ongoing) by Nicola Di Giorgio, an analysis both personal and formal of today’s Italian landscape. Mixed unpublished photographs and archival materials show how on the one hand concrete has become a structural element of the major architectural masterpieces created from the period of the economic boom to today, while on the other hand it is a symptom of the speculative drift that has compromised the balance between the sphere of the built and that of the natural.
The installation by Zoe Natale Mannella consists of works from two series of works: Taxidi (2018) and Underwater (2021). Using the maritime landscape as the main setting for her shots, declined in beach life in and out of the water, the artist highlights the themes of intimacy and sexuality through the representation of the female body. Starting from an observation of global self-determination movements such as Femen and No Bra, through individual and collective portraits, her work reflects on the concept of freedom of expression and gender equality through the nudity of the body.
Details and portions of marine, terrestrial, vegetable and machine bodies instead inhabit the installation created with large-format lightbox images taken from Sara Scanderebech’s archive (2019 – ongoing). Close-up views of raw seafood, an intimate couple, the wreck of a vehicle or a bamboo plant are the access key for further knowledge of what surrounds us, an invitation to dwell on parts of everyday life to fulfill the profound experience of things through photography.
Continuing her research on the archeology of cinema, Eleonora Roaro presents the audio-video installation Cinema Statuto (2023), a work based on a local story, i.e. the massacre that took place in the cinema of the same name in Turin where in 1983 64 people died of asphyxiation – following a fire. Drawing on materials from the RAI Media Library and from the films of the judicial experiment conserved in the Archives of the Court of Turin, and integrating them with two-channel audio, the work investigates the process of reconstructing the truth which is accomplished through the use photographic and video documentation. The exhibition itinerary closes with Shine On (2019), a documentary project by Alex Zoboli focused on another local story with a global character: the transformation of British national identity following the Brexit referendum, which led to the country leaving the European Union. A punctual and in-depth analysis of the social and political radicalization underway in Great Britain which, however, is daily influenced by the stimuli of the contemporary global media landscape. Not only changes but also paradoxes and contradictions, which permeate and shape the British marginal communities.
FUTURES is co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.
