DISINTEGRATA CON FOTO DI FAMIGLIA | SILVIA ROSI
Portrait photography has widely surpassed, if not overshadowed, its status as a pictorial surrogate: the common usage presents us such a variety of applications and therefore styles that exponentially expand what has been the widespread use, that of amateur family photos (and/or souvenir pictures).
What does it mean for a millennial artist to look at and produce photographs destined for use in an album or a frame on the hallway console at home?
A young girl poses in front of a red background, as anonymous as pervasive in the composition. Completing the bare set are two classic wooden bedside tables of a common design, seemingly entering the scene only to support silver frames containing photo-portraits.
Apparently classic is also the composition, for example the pose of the figure in the foreground; however, what is perceived is something that goes beyond the protagonist of the image and shifts onto the objects.
The environment is neither a domestic or everyday setting, nor does it have the neutrality of a set; familiarity is entrusted to the objects, which tell a far more complex story than what may initially appear. It’s the complexity of a disintegration that starts from the objects and elevates to the people. The wooden bedside tables become surrogates for missing figures in the scene: the father and mother? The grandparents? The photographs compensate for this absence or reconstruct it retroactively as a memory of something lost or never experienced.
Silvia Rosi uses vernacular photography as a stratagem to elaborate on her own personal and social experiences, seeking characteristics of universality in those who share similar conditions, those of an immigration history. Those who arrived in Italy from Africa before the 2000s and here have built and rebuilt, recomposing the fracture or disintegration of their individual and collective identity. A journey of vision that alternates between the dimensions of memory and that of projection and construction of one’s own future. It’s a game played on the edge of the image. An image that no matter how much it’s tested, dissected, analyzed, decomposed, or dematerialized, it will never fully disintegrate.
The artwork is currently exhibited as part of the Disintegrata exhibition at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, April 28th – July 28th, 2024, as part of Fotografia Europea 2024.
More information about the exhibition: link
Silvia Rosi
Disintegrata con Foto di Famiglia, 2024
Fine Art print on Baryta paper
© Silvia Rosi, realised with the support of Collezione Maramotti
25/05/24