Photo exhibition: Between Home and Wisdom, South African looks in the photographs by Tommaso Fiscaletti.
Venue details: Spazio Arte CUBO, Unipol, P.zza Vieira de Mello 3, Bologna, Italy Map It
Official Website: www.cubounipol.it
Event date: from 23-10-2015 to 16-01-2016
Opening hours: Monday 2.00 pm – 7.00 pm, Tuesday 9.30 am– 11.30 pm, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 9.30 am – 8.00 pm, Saturday 2.30 – 8.00 pm, Sunday closed
[P]resented for the first time in Italy, this is the South African debut project of Tommaso Fiscaletti, created in Cape Town, where the Italian photographer has been living and working since 2013.South African looks in the photographs by Tommaso Fiscaletti
“Between Home and Wisdom” is the result of research that becomes a sociological survey carried out through images, a series of photographs documenting the daily life of a community of women of Xhosa ethnicity, many of which are Sangomas.
In African culture, Sangomas are those people who practice ancestor worship and thanks to this gift are able to help others. They therefore play in society “a delicate and fragile role, true mediation between a complicated and difficult present and a past of long and deep-rooted traditions which you need to look at even today”(cit. text F. Maggia).
The fact that most of the women in the community of Dunoon, one of the many townships (slums) located on the outskirts of Cape Town, had this peculiarity so rooted in their tradition, led the artist to conceive a project whose central element was this different approach to life, divided between loneliness of worship and social life. The young photographer spent a long time looking at the place and at the people in their everyday life and, once having selected each scene, he worked on the light to recreate in his pictures the atmosphere hovering on that reality and its protagonists.
This project was in line with the specific design approach that has always characterized his work, namely “a stage photography with a documentary structure that allows little room to scenic construction, rather selecting spectacular natural environments which are essential, deliberately neutral, aseptic” (cit. text F. Maggia); this same atmosphere had already brought his work to the attention of the public, as well as some awards (Mondadori Art award, Celeste Prize, Arte Laguna Price, just to mention a few).
“In places like Dunoon, life has a particular density. A tangle of different materials composes its essence and it is as if you could feel life and death the same way, without those mental barriers we are normally accustomed to”, said the artist during the exhibition to present the project at the Harrington House in Cape Town, a greatly successful event with audience and critics.
Submitted by I live between Cape town and Milan and I work with photography and video.”]Tommaso Fiscaletti
