ILARIA TURBA (Como, 1978)
Théa, 2020 (from Le désir de regarder loin, 2021)
The word ‘desire’ means to navigate with no stars, it defines an absence and the need for a new way of finding direction. Before heading in a new direction – wherever that may be – one must slow down, open their eyes and try to look further, try to look for new common horizons
Le désir de regarder loin (The desire to look further) is a collective project and interdisciplinary laboratory that takes the cue from a collection of wishes in the northern neighborhoods of Marseille. The work was the result of a four-year residency; exhibited at Mucem in Marseille, it was published as an artist’s book. The exhibition won the Italian Council Award.
Ilaria Turba published JEST in 2016 with Peperoni Books; in 2023 postmedia books released Le Simmetrie dei Desideri, a book accompanying the exhibition at the Museum MAD – Murate Art District in Florence. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe and belongs to several collections.
In Ilaria Turba’s conceptually driven practice, photography is part of a broad interdisciplinary artistic engagement with communities and social change. Her projects are experimental and often wildly collaborative, incorporating the voices and influences of her collaborators, site- specific installations, performances and artist books.
The work has a coherent vision, a personal sensibility that emerges from the processes of inclusion and reframing of the communities and stories Turba chooses to tell.
Even in the use of archival material, the artist succeeds in giving a new order and meaning to images, involving the observer, almost challenging them to an irresistible exchange, inviting them to play, surprising them with stratagems that undermine the narrative content to reveal new ways of viewing personal history, domestic space, and the act of photography itself.
