Swim till I Sank – exhibition by Gabriele Stabile
October 19 @ 18:00 - November 25 @ 19:00
October 19 @ 18:00 – November 25 @ 19:00
(…) I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that’s not the same thing.
– Joseph Conrad, ‘The Secret Sharer’
After years working as a photojournalist in Italy, the United States, the Middle East and North Africa, Gabriele Stabile has reappropriated his images:
I couldn’t look at them anymore as they were. I would go to a place like Gaza or Lampedusa and spend time in hospitals, prisons, where I met people and established a relationship with them in situations that were too complex to be fully told in an editorial context. When and if published, the photographs would fit into a specific narrative and hold the attention span for a few seconds, while in my life those encounters bore an enormous weight. *
If the news cycle consumes images, Stabile brings them back to life. Moving between rationality and the subconscious, and with a good deal of experimentation – which has also led him to work with different materials like acrylics, canvas, wood – these photographs are lifted from oblivion through a filter that has something in common with dreams. A dimension much larger and wider than the exact memory or precise facts. These eyes go beyond the moment. They embrace time and see the beauty and elegance of gestures in places, times, actions far apart. Or also, conflict, sorrow, displacement in
The Aristotelian unities (action, time and place) have disappeared.
The artist’s gesture, the performance of creating, goes through two distinct moments: the immediate recording of an event first, and the elaboration of the same years later, when the images have dissipated their ties to the real, and memories have faded.
Practicing imagination becomes a necessary exercise to breathe new life and truth into the world.
The book – that you can buy here – was published by RVM-Hub in 2023
The book project was shortlisted by the LUMA Dummy Book Award in 2020;following the publication, it was shortlisted at PHotoESPAÑA Best Photography Book Award and won the Best Photoobook Award / Premio Bastianelli
On view at the gallery, a selection of unique pieces, all mixed technique, on paper and wood. Stabile will also teach a workshop over the weekend.
Gabriele Stabile is an internationally known Italian photographer.
He holds an MA in Photographic Journalism in London (with merit, Westminster Uni. 2006) and was valedictorian at ICP in 2007 and was selected among the PDN 30 photographers to watch in 2010. While based in New York he contributed regularily to the New Yorker Magazine, FADER, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal among others. He published, together with Juliet Linderman, an oral histories book chronicling the arrival and resettlement of refugee families in America (“Reugee Hotel”, McSweeneys, San Francisco, 2013), and the recipient of an yearlong commission from Aperture and the Tisch family.
His first monograph, Swim till I Sank, published by RVM hub was recently awarded the Marco Bastianelli prize for best photography book. The work was selected among the Gibellina Photoroad projects for 2024, and awarded the special mention at Liquida Photofestival.
info:
The exhibition is open 10am-1pm and 4-7pm or by appointment.
Artworks are for sale, if you are interested please email Giulia Zorzi – [email protected]
Micamera is in Milan, via Medardo Rosso, 19
ph. +39 02 9144 3090
* read: Gaia Squarci for Blind Magazine, 10 March 2023 – link here
