Discrete semi-darkness in the works of Mario Airò, Gregory Crewdson, Paola De Pietri, Paola Di Bello, Stefano Graziani, Franco Guerzoni, Armin Linke, Amedeo Martegani, Franco Vaccari, Awoiska van der Molen.

Zone di passaggio proposes a reflection on darkness and night, aiming to convey their important role in the collective imagination. Point of departure are the numerous works of night settings that Luigi Ghirri created throughout his production. These are places “lit in a provisional way, or the spaces that live their own discreet semi-darkness and that only temporarily become luminous in a festively provisional way,” activating an alternative reading of reality. For Ghirri, therefore, it is the flares, the flashes, the small intermittence such as those of fireflies that express the best modes of illumination, since they keep the perception of that darkness that is too often erased in favor of “glowing like film sets, where all the magic and allure of light has disappeared”.

Regarding the history of the photographic process, the relationship between light and darkness is essential. Various applications of artificial light have also made it possible to extend the possibilities of the medium, not only with respect to the capacity for image production itself, but by expanding its use in dark or dimly lit places such as caves and caverns.

An example can be seen in the 1914 volume by Albert Londe, titled La photographie à la lumière artificielle, one of the first manuals in photographic history to extensively illustrate various possibilities of artificial lights to apply in photographic technique. Published in a moment of great enthusiasm towards new possibilities offered by technological development within the context of artificial lights, the volume positions itself among two worlds. It is a compendium of the multiple – and often dangerous – techniques of darkness illumination, revealing an alchemical fascination towards light that reminisces of that pre-electric “paganism”, to a nature animated by an invisible force that evokes almost lost features of darkness and night.

Starting with experiments on medium and visibility carried out by Franco Guerzoni together with Luigi Ghirri and Franco Vaccari in the late 1960s, the exhibition presents works of further important authors offering “micro-ruptures” generated by sudden illuminations, questioning and rethinking the relationship we have with darkness. In his 1923 famous speech, A lecture on Serpent Ritual, Aby Warburg affirms that “electricity enslaved, the lightning held captive in the wire, has produced a civilization which has no use for heathen poetry” and, in a way, no use for the sacrality between humanity and nature. This perception is revealed on a new level of comprehension within the works of Mario Airò, Gregory Crewdson, Paola De Pietri, Paola Di Bello, Stefano Graziani, Armin Linke, Amedeo Martegani, and Awoiska van der Molen. Here, different projects evoke in diverse ways the place of possibility offered by darkness, whose blaze, openings, and illuminations allow for new configurations.

( Text by Ilaria Campioli)

Exhibition promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia (Musei Civici, Biblioteca Panizzi) in collaboration with the Archivio Eredi Luigi Ghirri. The exhibition is realized thanks to the European Funds of the Emilia-Romagna Region. With the Art Bonus contribution of IREN.