Ettaro

I am catapulted into a space suspended in time, where something has happened and something may be about to happen, but it’s not known when, or how; this “hectare” appears to be a place without memory and without identity. It’s not a landfill or a patch of land awaiting use, a field held “fallow” in need of rest; the fact is that the imaginary “surroundings"* Barthes urges us to heed* are not of great importance, and even seem not to exist, so strong is the "detached presence" of this non/place, as revealed in the images by Bologna.

Images that arrest me immediately with their language, as though emerging from the shell of materiality that I was accustomed to seeing in his previous work: the language has changed but not the form, which can be found intact despite the immediacy of the image, even without considering the complexity of composition.

I used to have to dig; now I fall right in.

A hectare of familiar shapes that will be consumed, that awaits transformation but for now remains as it is, like a slew of tales comprised of abandonments, wrecks, losses, and forgetfulness: nature become anonymous, without lush areas, without frills, that wouldn’t even serve well as a backdrop, that collects the refuse of consumption, the space of lived memories and distant acts.

The mastery of the photographer’s vision succeeds in transmuting that expanse of land into many short and intense narratives, in which you can lose yourself, revealing details that suddenly ignite to originals: strewn about, Bologna almost puts them back in order, in a row, the words of a story that could go on forever.

Space becomes place (and I can see Calvino smiling).

Sudden still lifes appear, Caravaggesque light, abstractionism where material passion again pushes to reclaim its own space, colors that ask forgiveness for having shown themselves without shame, earth, a broken mirror, morte with shards and little bird, leaves that seem to pierce the paper, paper that suddenly composes itself into a small visual poem, now that it has been “extracted*” from the all-devouring hectare.

White silver white.

A very fortunate synthesis between “this is/was” and “this shows/tells”, as if this strange living cemetery, in addition to telling the past, wanted to affirm its being now, powerfully, in the moment of the photographer's revelation.

Then come the words.

 Words that watch.

Angelo Lumelli creates "images from images of images,” smells with incredible correspondences (the mirror of the armoire, the exegesis of milk, the paper of chocolates), bringing these photographs (the term seems reductive in this case, but that is the proper term and it should be vigorously defended) into the light, ringed around by the music of words, and by the echo of another music, of elsewhere, present in the absence, the music of the history of bodily forms, of gestures both daily and extreme, of small, dormant revolutions.

 

So that an image speaks.

 

And the word is revealed.

 

The music is silent, is listening.

 

Memory of memories, somehow.

                                                                                                                               Bruno De Franceschi