THE BEGINNING OF THE FUTURE


Location: Villa Bottini, via Elisa, 9
Orari: venerdì, sabato e domenica 10:00 – 19:30


curated by Giulia Ticozzi and Arcipelago-19
with an audiovisual installation by Cesura
produced by Archivio Fotografico Lucchese “A. Fazzi”

The photographs and footage created in this period of Pandemic, unique in its kind, have become “symbolic images” and have made us feel shared emotions, becoming one-way messages and mediated moments  on a national scale: people at the window, queues at supermarkets,  revolts in prisons, the procession of tanks out of the Bergamo cemetery, intensive care at full capacity.

On the other hand, in the eyes of those who looked through the monitor, there was a margin for imagination and fear.

In this vein, the stories of many freelance photographers active in the area have turned into a fundamental testimony of a broader vision, different thanks to the experience of each one of them, an alternative by vocation, language and geography.
A constellation of images that is an active and alert witness.

The exhibition represents through a large number of works the different phases experienced in Italy to date.
The numerous photographers have faced stories of illness, treatment, mourning and seen empty cities, mountain valleys hit hard by the virus and growing tensions within society but also experienced solidarity and mutual support.
Another group of authors, on the other hand, tells about people forced to stay in their home. Many have rediscovered the faces of those next to them, their families, neighbors, hardly ever newswhorty, but fundamental for other aspects of  being human:  body, relationships, intimacy.

Now we are in a phase where we begin to glimpse a no return and in which we observe the passage of a threshold that previously seemed only dystopia: very quickly we found ourselves in a new world made of new words, new experiences and meanings.
Our presence on earth, the type of relationship we have with it, with the less noble aspects of commerce, production and relationships have consequences whose criticalities we now see.
Many authors approach  the rediscovered relationship with nature, the same that created the virus, which today is the only solution to a lifestyle that is too violent and exclusionary and which tells of centuries of a behavior that has led humans to a continuous conflict with it.
Many others have represented this passage and the attempt to react with new ways of working and socializing: a documentation whose value we will understand in future years, as has always happened in the great historical passages of our existence.

The installation Scherzo in tre tempi [Scherzo in three times] by Cesura investigates the relationship between viewers, triggering a short circuit that pushes the visitors to question themselves, in turn, about their condition of  spectators. A role that we have come to know in these months in which images, news and sounds have followed one another on the news and on social networks.