Descripción de la Exposición
HUMBERTO BRITO
RE-VISIONS
All exhibitions have ideas about themselves, but not often do they have good ideas, or ideas whose importance goes beyond the scope of the exhibition.
A title whose ambivalence may not be obvious to all visitors, this collection of works describes itself as a series of revisions, Re-visions. But why Re-visions? First of all, and in a trivial sense, because it's not their public debut. (All these works had been shown before.) Secondly, given that we have never seen them in this space and in dialog, the set suggests that re-seeing, or seeing again, is a new vision, a way of seeing for the first time. It is a fact that some of these images are unprecedent, brought to public eye by the act of re-seeing them, this is a fact. Which brings us to the heart of the matter: the revision as a specifically photographic gesture. The sets of images exhibited here are organized around a way of thinking about photography that breaks with its traditional definitions. We are used to describing it as an art of vision. However, each of these sets of images exemplifies a reflection on photography as a practice of re-vision. Nothing new under the sun, as Ghirri insisted, what the photographer sees is always, in each of these examples, something that returns, a recognition, a ghost, a vague memory, a familiar tone.
Carlos Lobo shows us images of Japan. Made in Tokyo and Osaka in the aftermath of a natural catastrophe (the 2011 tsunami that caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster), his first formulation, exhibited a few times and published in a monograph (The Idea of Silence, 2011), explored "the poetic idea of silence and calm after the storm, and whether and how photography is capable of portraying a traumatic landscape without being exploitative". And yet, we can only recognize the ghosts of North American and European neo-topographic photography, especially the search for a silence that evokes and awakens, in reference to a wounded, elegiac Japan, the interior landscapes of Robert Adams.
Interior landscapes are also what define the work of Sebastiano Raimondo, who here brings together - revisits - reconfigures - images from three works. These are 1. 'Le Sirene Dentro' ('The Sirens Within', Naples, 2014-15); 2. 'Custodire Soglie' ('Caring for Thresholds', Palermo, 2009-2018); and 3. 'Reduce-re' ('Re-return', Sicily, 2007-2018, the series with which he won the Vila Franca de Xira Photography Biennial 2022). The first emerges from the experience of (re-)seeing a city (Palermo) through another city (Naples), in a "sequence whose genesis is linked to meetings, readings, studies and imaginary stories in which I saw coincidences with my interests and real life". If La Sirene Dentro suggests an idea of photography as a vision of oneself through contact with the present, not so much a self-analysis as an auto-ethnography, it is not, however, a romantic projection of the 'I'. The priority is always a methodologically uninhibited or lyrical understanding of what is in front of the photographer's eyes, whose mediation by framing frames (doors, windows, etc.) is the subject of 'Custodire Soglie'. Pointing to a series of thresholds, this series reflects on his porous, dreamlike epistemology, which we find again in 'Reduce-re', in which, starting from his native geography, the Madonie, in Sicily, and its hieratic and mythological codification, Raimondo imagines photography as a constant, image to image, gesture of returning home.
A return that is sometimes late and unexpected, even dissociated from the act of photography. The images that make up 'La ricerca di un titolo' (1983-2013) are the result of a reunion with almost (if not quite) forgotten negatives, printed around 2018. From the moment of a fortuitous encounter with the archive, the revision of these images gives rise to a chain of undisciplined readings and associations (in the sense that they exceed any stable methodology). Associations through which the author revisits elective affinities through which he elaborates a certain type of fiction: that of re-constituting, or 'restoring', from fragments, the residue of a city in personal and collective memory. "As residues of a double archaeology, of the photographed subject and of analog technology," explains Paulo Catrica, "these photographs intend to operate as an imperfect ellipsis of Rome."
Therefore, this set of series is a brief manifesto on self-conscious photography: photography understood as revision and re-seeing, if I may put it that way. Photography that is engaged in understanding its own processes and strategies and which, through contact with the non-self, is a persistent return, an endless reunion - of the photographer with himself, of photography with itself - for which the priority of the world over the photographer is a sine qua non.
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RE-VISIONS
Carlos Lobo, Paulo Catrica, Sebastiano Raimondo
25.01 - 22.03.2025
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Exhibition Text : Humberto Brito
Photography : Bruno Lopes
Video : João Silva
Premio. 01 feb de 2025 - 28 feb de 2025 / Madrid, España
Exposición. 26 feb de 2025 - 01 sep de 2025 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
Formación. 01 oct de 2024 - 04 abr de 2025 / PHotoEspaña / Madrid, España
