More and more in recent decades, photography, considered to all intents and purposes a visual language, finds space with the aim of capturing a moment, an instant, which can block reality over time with the aim of telling a story that will never be forgotten. A visual language, therefore, that freezes reality, but at the same time gives reality to the most hidden and deepest dreams.

The editor Jim Casper said: “The language of photography continues to be increasingly interesting and complex, as it becomes the most universal means of communication in the world”. In Catania, Plenum – Contemporary Photography, a contemporary photography gallery in the city center, promotes and disseminates art photography in Sicily and southern Italy.

Until February 9th the gallery will host the solo show of Silvia Camporesi, entitled Atlas Italiae and curated by the artistic director Massimo Siragusa. The artist, born in Forlì in 1973, with a degree in philosophy, lives and works between Forlì and Bologna, over the years through the wise use of photography and video tells the Italian landscape by putting together shooting ideas from myth, literature, from religions and from real life.

The exhibition is the result of a devotional journey of about two years, in which the artist explores and looks at Italy through new eyes and which allows her to bring home images that become memories of a peninsula to be discovered, cherished, loved and never forgotten. The photos taken by the artist tell of ghost villages, architectures engulfed by vegetation, industrial spaces and former seaside colonies in ruins and never before existed.

What then comes out, through the shots, is an Italy that resists and survives itself, despite the hand of man who with his actions is capable of modeling the beauty of the past with temporary and destructive interventions: a country that does not end within the confines of the usual tourist routes, but lives on single and isolated works, hidden and almost secret, on the edge of the usual beauty or in places that are not very valued.

“Silvia Camporesi – explains the curator Massimo Siragusa – with her work guides us through an Italy in decay, like a metaphor for the present time. Thanks to her powerful, but at the same time sweet and poetic gaze, every place visited on her long journey loses any negative meaning, to become a symbol that we feel the need to keep in our heart and in our memory’’.

Info:

ATLAS ITALIAE | SILVIA CAMPORESI
curated by Massimo Siragusa
Plenum – Fotografia Contemporanea
via Vecchia Ognina 142/b, Catania
14 December 2019 – 09 February 2020