Diecixdieci Photography Festival

Seven glances at the invisible
Or rather: seven invisible itineraries through the pages

Exhibition + Talk Sunday, September 19 at 11am

At least once in our lives we all have experienced the hilarity of hitting in a glass door.

How can we represent that transparent wall – that caused the bump on our forehead? We might photograph its reflections, or its outlines. Would that be enough?

The representation of the invisible is almost an oxymoron, an implicitly complex undertaking that begins trying to identify what to photograph.

Nevertheless, it is precisely this ambiguity that makes it possible to go beyond the schemes and the photographic patina, raising the status of photography from simple visualisation to a threshold into other dimensions of reality. Like establishing continuity between the tangible and the apparent, between the possible and the imaginable.

Only tracing the boundaries we can attempt to control something and, consequently, re-construct it. The representation of mental illness, of the dynamics of control underlying the mechanisms of power, narratives that are so painful that they exist beyond language… all efforts of imagination for the foundation of a more inclusive society, one that comes to terms with worlds that seem to be very distant, intangible – and nevertheless, often concern us more that the material ones.

Learning to read the invisible, then, is the necessary counterpart.

In ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (original title: Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu), a short story written by Honoré de Balzac in the mid 19th century and set in the 17th century, the writer tells the story of an old bourgeois art expert, Frenhofer, who, having learned all the secrets of painting, creates a masterpiece that he agrees to show – after much insistence – only to two friends. One of them is a young Nicolas Poussin. Lifting the veil covering the painting, the friends discover, to their dismay, that the entire surface is covered with colour and marks: there is no way of recognizing the woman described by the old man. Frenhofer, realising that his guests had not understood his work of art (the result of continuous research and reflection) fell into a deep desolation. He burned all his paintings and died that very night.

Is the secret hidden in the sequence? Is it the succession of images that offers the right potential for representing the invisible?

The exhibited books:

Ahndraya Parlato – A Spectacle and Nothing Strange
Kehrer, 2016
Hardback, 30 x 24 cm
104 pages, 56 color photographs
English text

Beata Bartecka & Łukasz Rusznica – How to Look Natural in Photos
Palm* Studios & OPT, 2021
Hardback, 26,4 x 20 cm
304 pages, black and white and color photographs
English and Polish text

Joanna Piotrowka – Stable Vices
MACK, 2021
Hardback, 17 x 21,5 cm
176 pages, black and white and color photographs
English text

Marten Lange – The Mechanism
MACK, 2017
Hardback, 22 x 28 cm
96 pages, 56 black and white photographs
English text

Ken Light – Midnight la Frontera
TBW, 2020
Hardback, 29 x 33,5 cm
136 pages, 66 black and white photographs
English and Spanish text

Giorgio Di Noto – The Iceberg
Patrick Frey, 2017
Hardback, 16,5 x 24 cm
128 pages, 70 photographs
English text

Richard Mosse – Displaced
Fondazione MAST, 2021
Softbound, 21 x 26,5 cm
202 pages, black and white and color photographs
Italian and English text

Here the full program of the festival