“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

​

Exhibiting artists: Didier Bay, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Roger Cutforth, Jochen Gerz, Peter Hutchinson,

Jean Le Gac, Heikki Kaski, Luca Massaro, Jacopo Gospel Quaggia, Helmut Schwarzer.

In collaboration with: Boite, Studio d’Arte Cannaviello

  

“Narrativa” (Narrative) is a show where text and images merge together, influencing and completing one another. The exhibition project started from a curiosity from some artworks belonging to Narrative Art, an art movement from the 70s that was born as a response to Conceptual and Body art, which turned photography to a mere tool of documentation.

 

We noticed that these images turned photography into the protagonist of the artwork yet they were completely anti-heroic. Moreover, they seemed to us as if they could have been shot in present days. This anti-artistic approach, which could lead us to think of being a result of a complete lack of knowledge in the use of the photographic medium, somehow led us to make a link with current photographic practices. Why?

 

Something very naive links these photographs, far from a utilitarian approach, that takes us back to what Bergson called “profound memory”, in which the crucial point is the experience itself and what has been lived, or the “lived-non- lived” as Gerz referred to as. There is no intention in depicting things as they are, or in making them abstract, or in affirming with extreme clarity some sort of truthness, rather the confirmation of what is real by focusing on what is often overlooked.

We can thus talk of a “banal” use of photography, even though the result seems anything but that, shaping itself around what is usually called “family” photography, erasing time, activating memories and escaping every critique, for its crystal clear and convincing nature.

 

This is how the story begins, as Sartre stated, a story that can arise even from the most banal repertoire, as some photographs coming from an old family album. What turns reading and vision into an adventure is the narrator’s feelings.