Curated by Francesco Zizola, promoted by Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, produced by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, realised and organised in collaboration with 10b Photography
The exhibition is the act of restitution to the public a wider-ranging project, which includes residencies in Rome for internationally renowned photographers and which the Capitoline administration has been pursuing for some time now with the aim of enhancing photography and endowing the city of Rome with a heritage of images capable of restoring its identity through different gazes.
For this year’s edition Francesco Zizola invited to Rome four figures renowned in the world of art production and international photography – Antonio Biasiucci, Max Pinckers, Alfred Seiland and Olivia Arthur – who had to work in the absolutely unprecedented conditions created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Working during and immediately after lockdown, they addressed this unprecedented situation by developing thoughts and research focusing on the themes of time and space, bodies and relationships, urban and interior space – the selfsame issues that populate the most advanced debates on images and the way they work today.
These works renew the language of photography while at the same time developing an unashamed critique of that language.
Olivia Arthur (London 1980) bravely takes on the less visible side of Rome. Managing to get herself invited into the homes of a number of Roman families during lockdown, she paints a portrait of them that transforms the marks of the pandemic into a metaphor of time, de facto historicising them in the setting of an ancient city that is at once a cradle and a tangle of different peoples, ethnic groups and stories.
Antonio Biasiucci (Dragoni, Caserta 1961) immersed himself in the evanescent traces of pagan Rome that he found in the thick vegetation which had reclaimed its space and presence in the city during the pandemic. What his photography, presented in the shape of polyptychs, expresses is a constant tension towards a distant yet visible past whose memory emerges to take on magical and sacred forms suggested by the new organic entities embodied in the stones and in nature.
Max Pinckers (Brussels 1988) uses the camera to offer us a reflection on the multiplicity and subjectivity of images in relation to reality, staged here with the aim of echoing the myths of Rome embodied in Neorealist cinema.
The sequences he offers us can be interpreted as minor philosophical pamphlets on the relativity of time and space, of the viewpoint and credibility of photographic images.
Alfred Seiland (St. Michael, Austria 1952) retraces a theme of which he is very fond, juxtaposing the ancient past of the Roman Empire and its remains with the forms of our contemporary world. The novelty of the setting for this juxtaposition being altered by the pandemic situation provided him with an opportunity to enrich an already consolidated project with new and original images.
Through their different visual and conceptual approaches, these new exhibits offer a deep, multifaceted insight into the multiple souls of the city, forming a new, additional and important legacy for the collection of the Museo di Roma’s Photographic Archive.