Alessandra Piolotto
Happy Hour in A major

Opening on Tuesday, June 6 from 6.30 pm
through July 15

Photography is for me a place of visual and semantic experimentation; it creates connections to other languages, amplifying the possible translations of the perceptible and becoming a bridge to other artistic expressions such as textile, writing, sculpture and sound.
What changes over time is not the act of seeing, but the experience of it.
– A. Piolotto

Alessandra Piolotto is an explorer of anonymous photographs.
The focus of her investigations is always an image, the author of which is unknown, as is its context and origin. Piolotto has developed, through an intense exercise of attention, a method for navigating the image, inhabiting it. The practice is slow and precise: she follows clues and collects evidence, from the simple and precious — an inscription on the back, say (a dedication, or the name of a place) — to the microscopic, inaccessible to the untrained eye.

One fragment of reality refers to another and yet another, as in concentric circles: the world of the artist mingles with the universe of the image; hints and inquiries interweave with her own speculations. The resulting work is a new, unexpected reading.
The process renews with each photograph, generating a different work every time, as Piolotto experiments with various materials, collaborates with other artists, and delves into new territories.
The consitent thread is narrative: we could say that the anonymous image and its story are the basic elements, which Piolotto classifies and archives, as any researcher would do.

One of these explorations will be on view at Micamera.
It begins with photograph depicting a girl seated on the floor, about to listen to a cassette tape. There is a story here, obviously; the version we present at Micamera features a soundtrack created in collaboration with artist Gea Brown, and a series of sculptures and artifacts to be discovered around the gallery.
It is a hybrid, three-dimensional, narrative montage that renders the space Alessandra Piolotto constructs and inhabits. From one image, a new world.

Alessandra Piolotto’s explorations are also on display at the Cinema Beltrade in Milan.

ALESSANDRA PIOLOTTO (1976) After attaining a degree in History of Art, a master’s degree in cultural planning between art and design at the Catholic University of Milan, and a postgraduate course in museum and art anthropology at Bicocca University of Milan, Piolotto became interested in the anthropological and botanical investigation of historical contexts, cultural identity and environmental practices, starting from aesthetics and ending with art criticism. In 2014, she completed a course in Textile Art at the Academy of Fine Arts “Wladyslaw Strzeminski” in Łódź, in collaboration with the Department of Graphic Art and Painting, Artistic Engraving and the Department of Textile Art, Printing on Textiles, Faculty of Textiles and Fashion.

Her research is cross-disciplinary, ranging from archival photographic research to botanical research under a microscope, through a path of translation of underlying and invisible aspects. The ‘microscopic’ becomes a paradigm of reference, branching out from archival photographs to the written word, textile or sculpture.

She has collaborated with various independent contemporary art spaces, including O’ and Micamera, and has written for RVM Rear View Mirror magazine. Since 2019 Piolotto has presented a selection of her work at Cinema Beltrade in Milan.

In 2020-2021 she produced two art editions related to the ‘Compost waste and fertility’ section of larger archive of images and narratives created in 2015, and also presented at the PAC-Padiglione di arte contemporanea in Milan, in December 2016, as part of the cycle of lectures (within Armin Linke’s exhibition ‘The Appearance of That Which Cannot be Seen’) dedicated to the possible uses of archival photographs.

She is currently collaborating on a research and exhibition project conceived together with Fabio Marullo, entitled ‘Parasitic Sublimities’ at the Botanical Garden of Turin, thanks to the collaboration framework agreement for scientific, educational and public engagement activities (Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology).

Soon to be published is a numbered edition of 100 copies dedicated to her latest work Sancta Ratio Chaotica! L’ora felice in La maggiore, that was presented in December 2022 at Cinema Beltrade.