breaks/Kintsugi

looks at the traces of violent chane in the Alps’ mountains. Once considered powerful and stable Inatural objects,

in recent years we have become aware of their fragility, the outcome of violent evolution and the damage caused by

human intervention. As an expression of aesthetic and political concerns, I wonder whether there is anything we

can do to repair the wounds. Can I, as an artist, imagine a non-invasive visual strategy of healing?

Breaks/Kintsugi has allowed me to explore photography as a language, its long history and materiality, and to

expand its richness, when it was hailed as an “objective” witness of what exists around us, an instrument that

“freezes” a moment in the flux of time, and a technique for producing countless and therefore widely available

material prints.

In the final version, images are paired: the image on the left records the outcome of natural and human change; I

have stressed some fractures, or wounds, by embossing the paper in the printing phase. The image on the right

attempts to show some healing: I have filled the embossments withfragments of stone, resorting to the practice of

Kintsugi, a way to repair fractures without hiding the scars left on the objects. The final result is somehow a third

object, which is neither the original version of the scene documented in the photograph, nor a fictional creation.

The printed method I have chosen is constitutive of the project itself: I have expressed the intense “materiality”

and “historicity” of photography and of the subject matter I have chosen by using a photogravure technique applied

to a polymeric base, in the footsteps of XIXth and early XXth century photogravures. As was the case with those

older works, each “print” I produce is unique. I can indeed produce as many as I want or can, but my hope is to

contribute to the conversation about the role of the singular work of art in contempphotographic practice,going

beyond its classical interpretation as typical of “the age of mechanical reproduction” and addressing, indirectly, the

issues raised by today’s stochastic AI creation.