TRIES TO DE/COMPOSE THE LANDSCAPE

BETWEEN PARMA, REGGIO AND MODENA

Carlo Quintelli: The architecture, the one that would like to interpret the territory, has often used in recent times the photography as an enquiry tool to understand the city, suburbs and urban territory landscapes. This relationship tends to define itself more and more as a pseudo-collaboration, to be drawn as a fact to a condition of working under someone. The architect assign a theme, a context, a trace to a photographer that will make an opportuniy out of it for a reading, the value of which will fall upon the intepretative responsibilty of the author. Once it’s acquired, the photographer’s work is used by the architects as a proof for trends, mutations, aesthetics, of a becoming for which the architect put himself as a project intepreter. But this going on, between the parts’ autonomy and an exploiting of the photographic expression in a critical-project key, seems many times to elude real responsibilities of analysis or chose by the side of the architect – who often brings “false” or not so significant proofs in respect to the need of a sytematic critic – and on the other side to oblige the photograph to an unintenional role (the one of the project), in not indirectly in the way every artist has to and should use a critic intepretative outcome in relation to a given historical and geographical context as an assumption for its own expressive peculiarity.

Starting from these premises we then ask ourselves if the relation between photography and architecture in the critical project action of transformation and bringing out of the landscape couldn’t establish itself with a more effective complementarity, surely difficult to reach but not ambiguos, where both the techniques could find an instrumental combination equal and direct inside the interpetative action. The research, limited to the Emilia landscape, could use work groups made of architects and photographs able to experiment in the contexts of the “Bassa”, of the middle plan crossed by the Via Emilia, and the zone “Pre-appeninica”, the individation of a survey of the landscape significative components, able to give back a first compositional picture.

Stable and re-emerging parts, archeologies and new phenomena, continuity and discontinuity, contraddictions able to subtract or add the identity-making richness of the landscape palimpsest should surface during the patrol of a geo-photgraphic enquiry trying to systematize, in a thematic-typologic key, the restitution of the becoming of the landscape picture. Starting from road itineraries where the point of view is literally “brought” to catch elements and sequences of which we’ll verify, with cases, the capacity to demonstrate and the significance of its contribution.  

Paolo Barbaro: It’ surely not the first time that photography, the photographers, face the Via Emilia landscape. The landscape of the Via Emilia is precisely the one referred o the road axis (that you see from the road, on the road and around the road) but even the surrounding landscape, determined more or less consistently by the roman foundation that run approximately from east to the west, central nerve of the roman “centuriazioni” and of the actual transport and communication network, even more than real maybe on anm imaginary level: we have, today, the parallel historical railway axis Milano-Bologna-Rimini, the long building site and future line of the TAV, and overall the of the A1 corridor; and finally the Po river. Crossing in a nearly orthogonal way these vectors we have more lines, even these from natural and artificial superimposition: the parallel flows of the rivers coming down from the Appennini, to which go over from place to place the provinces’ borders, the valleys, the road of the passes on the south, the plain road on the north, the padana inferiore, till the river Po banks. 

The photographic campaign, now a piece of history, about this territory are very well known, from the ones centered on cities and their eminent objects, monuments and icons, works of ateliers or local and national operators (Alinari, Villani, Stefani) till the ones that consider the territorial and local qualities of the imaginary, first of all Esplorazioni della Via Emilia coordinated by Luigi Ghirri (1985-87), to which refer many following rereadings and seminars organised by the Istituzione Culturale Linea di Confine, initiatives like Cittaemilia, and the Fotografie Locali and more, apart from important “author” campaigns like the recent one Nino Migliori did for the IBC.

Photography then that confronted itself, has been an expression or expressed different ideas on this territory.

The Photography, the photographers that will enter the field for this initiative of the Festival 2007-2008 will tackle an eminetly synchronic goal (what is today this territory, going through roads and centres) that will concerne even diachronic questions: what we can read of its history, of its development, and finally (dut maybe it’s the first instance) we should derive material for the future, memory and project.

In a correspondence with the Festival extension on three provinces, the photographers will work following strips based on provinces/horizontal orientation (Modena, Reggio and Parma) interlaced with vertical/territorial strips (hills strip, strip overhanging to the Via Emilia, plain strip till the river Po) using the photography as a reading and local space and qualities analysis instrument. Photography that is able to connect and describe with wide ranges, to isolate and compress taking in the frame, to cut and put in relationship, to sequence narrations and articulate parallel comparisons on the territory in which they live.