Chronicles
Pinhole photos, variable dimensions, Dire il tempo Roman Opalka Mariateresa Sartori, curator Chiara Bertola, site specific work Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venezia 2019
Chronicles
Inseguendo l’ordine del tempo, curator Chiara Fumai, Galleria Doppelgaenger, Bari 2019, photo Beppe Gernone
The work is the reelaboration of fragments of paintings from the Museum’s mythological room through the process of pinhole photography. A simple carboard box has a hole through which light passes and this impresses the image on the photosensitive paper placed inside it.The procedure is very close to human physiology: the box is the head, the hole is the eye, the photosensitive paper is the retina. It is a mechanical process on which the possibility of intervention is extremely limited: there are countless variables it is impossible to have control over and which contribute to the final result, which is the sum of everything that has happened during the long exposure times.
In the site-specific work Chronicles, conceived specially for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia Museum, the passage from one image to another filtered by the pinhole process recalls mnemonic processes and how images are impressed (in a literal sense) in our memory.The pinhole fragments of the Querini works are intended as traces of memory which take on new life, assuming different meanings just as our fragmented memory of things is presented as out of focus and imprecise. Due to its intrinsic char- acteristics, pinhole photography is both mechanical imprint and mnemonic trace.
The work is the reelaboration of fragments of paintings from the Museum’s mythological room through the process of pinhole photography. A simple carboard box has a hole through which light passes and this impresses the image on the photosensitive paper placed inside it.The procedure is very close to human physiology: the box is the head, the hole is the eye, the photosensitive paper is the retina. It is a mechanical process on which the possibility of intervention is extremely limited: there are countless variables it is impossible to have control over and which contribute to the final result, which is the sum of everything that has happened during the long exposure times.
In the site-specific work Chronicles, conceived specially for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia Museum, the passage from one image to another filtered by the pinhole process recalls mnemonic processes and how images are impressed (in a literal sense) in our memory.The pinhole fragments of the Querini works are intended as traces of memory which take on new life, assuming different meanings just as our fragmented memory of things is presented as out of focus and imprecise. Due to its intrinsic char- acteristics, pinhole photography is both mechanical imprint and mnemonic trace.
The images which undergo this process acquire the surprising objectivity of radiography devoid of their temporal references of origin.
The elderly man with the beard, the dog, the boy, vegetal elements: they all leave the narration of their time and unexpectedly – and dramatically – become current in the eyes of those observing them. They are facts of contemporary chronicle which each of us can trace in our own personal memory
