Conceptual Photography Exhibition #Alinquiete

 

In August 2020, I created my first conceptual photography exhibition titled #Alinquiete – Of Ulysses’ Tempest.

Initially displayed at Palazzo Cavarretta in Trapani and later at Trapani Airport, the exhibition draws inspiration from the many journeys I took during those years and from the photographs captured along the way.

Starting from a photo taken in Bologna, chosen for its compositional beauty, balanced framing and deep perspective framed by the city’s portico, I selected twelve photographs. Twelve, like the twelve stages Ulysses, the ultimate traveler, encounters during his Homeric voyage across the Mediterranean.

From this idea, the foundation of #Alinquiete was born.

After selecting the photos, the concept emerged to frame them within the screen of a smartphone, inside a meta-social network with a deliberately kitsch name: Ulinstagram. A metaphor for a life increasingly filtered through the thousand eyes that crowd the tail of the peacock that today’s social networks have become. Through that self-narration we dissect, as if we were aesthetic surgeons of the conceptual, attempting to build our ideal public identity.



This social network, this Ulinstagram, is itself populated by users who comment on and appreciate the photographs. Hence the presence of c.rens, t.resia, PolifanoOo, with their profile images and the silent tragedies of their lives, invisible yet present in the background.

It is a journey, then, from Ulysses’ plundering of the land of the mc.coni to his arrival in the realm of naos_i_caa. There, he is finally granted the possibility of returning home. A journey that moves from west to east. From dawn to dusk. From youth to old age.

With our smartphone battery slowly draining along the route (the printed battery icons on the exhibition panels diminished as the viewer advanced), at the end of our personal voyage we finally reach our own Ithaca, represented here by a sunset over Torre di Ligny in Trapani.

Where all photographs were printed on one-meter by half-meter polionda panels, our Ithaca is instead a canvas, placed at the center of the room and supported by an easel.

No meta-social frame, no need for sharing, no frenzy to appear. There is only home. A sunset, perhaps a new dawn. A solitary boat pointing toward the sea, toward a new journey, physical or spiritual. The eternal cycle of struggle interrupted by that brief moment in which everything changes.

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During the exhibition, I would briefly explain to visitors what they were seeing and, at the end of their journey, I would place them before the easel displaying Ithaca. There I would say: “This is a mirror. In light of what you understood from the exhibition, what do you see?”

The answers varied widely.
An elderly visitor saw Ithaca as death.
A young woman, with many years ahead of her, saw a moment of stopping to recharge her batteries.
A tourist used the word “serenity”.
Another woman, overwhelmed by too many people in her life, saw long-desired solitude and calm.
A friend saw the pause that precedes a new departure.
Another visitor saw two people hidden under the boat’s edge, making love.
Someone even noticed the small lighthouse at the center of the image and identified it as the focal point of the entire work: that small but solid goal we must pursue in life.

I personally appreciated this interactivity. I believe that, in the Babel of meaning-making that shapes our lives, art is an effective tool for helping us “connect the dots”, strengthening or expanding the meaning of our world, our nuanced and chaotic Lebenswelt, and making us more aware of our own version of events.

In an artwork where the final meaning is decided by the viewer, I believe we can dig deeper within ourselves to extract a small but precious awareness to retrieve later, perhaps, to help us live better.

And I hope I was able to give my visitors a piece of themselves they had not yet discovered.


Report on Telesud

 

TORNA AGLI ARTICOLI