Elegìa
Pietro Bologna
Elegìa is inspired by a family journey through Sicily. Alongside private moments, Pietro Bologna photographed the island’s artistic, cultural, and natural heritage. The resulting series, Mio malgrado (2018), was printed using the gum print process—a photographic printing technique that experienced renewed interest among experimental artists during the twentieth century.
Elegìa is composed of the twenty-four matrices used to create the gum prints of Mio malgrado. Illuminated from behind, these matrices reveal the traces of labor and the wear of the paper itself. Fractures, cuts, and perforations highlight both the resilience of the material and the significance of what remains invisible, intangible, and inaudible within human experience, echoing the reflections of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
For Bologna, photography is fundamentally connected to light before it is connected to representation, meaning, or narrative. As he suggests:
“Photography is concerned with light before it is concerned with representations, meanings, or stories. Perhaps we should learn not to search for meaning. In an age dominated by machines, I return to matter.”
Through this exploration of materiality, Elegìa invites viewers to consider photography not only as an image-making process, but as a physical and sensory encounter with time, memory, and presence.
curator Elena Carotti
partner Lab 1930. Fotografia contemporanea, Milan (IT)
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Adress
Foundation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz
18 rue de la Calade 13200 Arles
OPENING HOURS
Currently closed to the public.
© Foundation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz
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