The fourteenth edition of FOTOGRAFIA – International Festival of Rome will open at the MACRO museum of Rome, this october 8th. The theme will be “The Present”.
In a world of constant and sudden acceleration, photographic practice – whose mechanisms of production and distribution are now almost immediate – present itself as art privileged to fix and define the present, to observe and to delimit its boundaries.
Defining the boundaries of the present means in the first place to separate it and to abstract it from the time restrictions that threaten it, which have been already heavily investigated, and turn our gaze instead at that endless moment capable of self-represention and self-determination. Thus depriving the photography both from nostalgia of what have been, and from the anxiety caused by the transformations of tomorrow, emerges the time of the experience that is the time of what is felt and lived. This way of looking at this present time means to look around and understand the space around us, overtaking the rhetoric of the decisive moment and turning instead to the unrepeatable of today, positioning ourselves at the center of this universe and investigate the links that build the world as we today perceive it, observe it and then live it.
The photographic practice will give us the tools needed, thanks to its ability to isolate and frame that Edoardo Albinati emphasized in the preface of the first edition of the festival: “Born as a replica of the already evident, of a reality that we take as “given”, photography today provides aesthetic knowledge with its the most outstanding framework – that is, that exclusion , that conscious leveling that isolates a space by indicating it as a place of representation – without giving up on that account the task of bearing witness. […] But it’s especially its high capacity for isolation and concentration that makes photography particular noteworthy among the visual arts. What I’m talking about is that “framing”, which is a prerequisite of every vision, and which alone can assure us an effective experience, and experience of something. Amidst the myriad perceptions that constitute the communicative universe in whose cloud we are wrapped which ends up by hiding us no less than it hides things from us, photography isolates and magnifies its datum by putting it in a frame, by creating, in other words, that step, that difference through which the datum reveals itself to us, in all its brightness, and we are revealed, that is liberated from that cloud of communicative interference, which in its turn renders us indistinct, confuse, unreal.”
Mohamed Keita, Roma, 2014