PALERMO, ITALY.- Palermo's Galleria dell'Arco, via Siracusa 9, is pleased to announce the personal exhibition of the photographer Emanuele Lo Cascio, entitled Da nessuna parte ['Nowhere'], curated by Paola Nicita. The opening is scheduled for March 17th at 18.30. The exhibition consists of a selection of diptychs, realized during Lo Cascio's journey in South America. Each diptych is composed via the juxtaposition of the image of a landscape with a portrait, materialized one next to the other, linked by a mutual and mysterious energy, captured by the artist's glance. Such a relation is either constructed by minimal formal devices, or through more articulated connections.
The long trip made by the artist through Argentina, Patagonia, Chile, up to the extreme strip of the Land of Fire, can be viewed not only as an act of crossing of physical borders but also as a crossover of mental boundaries, that in fact have never been marked before; above all it is also the occasion to encapsulate a fragment of knowledge into a photographic image, manifold (and mutable) emotional sounding of people and places.
As the curator Paola Nicita writes: "those are faces and places that, while belonging to a specific geographical location, actually come from and shore to 'nowhere', but not in the sense of Marc Augé's 'non-places', for in fact Lo Cascio's pictures oppose the stringent truth of the individual against the massification and 'plastification' of space highlighted by Augé. In the increasing substitution of reality with images, as theorized by Paul Virilio - that nowadays more and more constitutes the 'emisphere of vision' (and hence of knowledge) - photography poses new questions, less with reference to external codices like perspective, relation between main figuration and setting or between levels of vision, than to only relative standpoints and social, human, psychological, dynamics of interaction. In choosing the subjects for his photographs, Emanuele Lo Cascio is aware of the fact that in every single landscape there is a portrait and viceversa, and both tell stories of everyday life, which are not ephemeral but lasting. [...] Thus, photography being destined to an existence that comes necessarily after the moment it aims to grasp, cannot help being associated with the idea of loss. [...] The definition of present time and that of place are therefore on the verge of their vanishing, through the codification of an actual, single instant that annihilates the categories of what-is-here.
Emanuele Lo Cascio. born in Palermo in 1974, studied at the American Academy of Art of Chicago where he gained a degree in Communication. He currently lives in Palermo and collaborates with Italian and foreign magazines such as L'Espresso, D - La Repubblica delle Donne, GQ International and The New York Times. In 2005 he undertook his trip throughout South America to realize a photographic project based on the topic of portrait and landscape.
