BUILDING SITES AND COUNTRIES

Things can talk to us just like people can. A wall, a door, a window, a house, a utensil are all eyes upon us, voices talking to us. Just like the passing of time carves wrinkles in faces, it crumbles walls and decays matter.
How long have they been there? And for how long still, before disappearing, ousted or substituted by the new? Light from east to west, seasons, clouds, the green that finds a breach, that’s the only thing that animates their presence.
Those structures, those buildings, those things speak to each of us differently: silence, peace, desolation, waiting, death, beauty.
No ethical or aesthetic judgement: everyone feels like themselves.
In Building Sites and Countries, I put together photographs taken in Italy and abroad as of the early 2000s.

Angela Pietribiasi

Within the contemporary art panorama, Angela Pietribiasi conducts an intimist and unique subjective study. The author favors abandoned areas, rundown neighborhoods, forgotten places. In her wanderings, through her poetic vision, she explores sites of industrial archeology, grasping an implied and metaphysical beauty of abandoned industrial buildings, ex-building sites or other scenarios of abandoned work, cloaked in silence within the summer twilights. With the natural light of the precise instant, she attempts to immortalize something else, waiting areas, laden with underlying social problems, by placing different subjects in relation to one another. Some of the images seem like they are painted; they recall Mario Sironi’s urban landscapes, Carlo Carra’s colors, Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical views, the light of Felice Casorati and Edward Hopper and other painters from Margherita Sarfatti’s group from the 1900s (let us not forget that the artist started out as a painter). Her crumbled walls, the windows, the closed doors, the dilapidated gutters, ladders, pails and tools forgotten on the building sites and other fragments of time, seen like evanescent specters of human presences.
These and other photographic testimonies of time and space “write” a subjective visual diary in which each detail becomes an outline, a find, a sign, a memory. Images that are presupposed to immortalize the process of change in society, cause and effect of industrial urbanization that modifies our behavior, habits and values.

Her insidious metaphysical and silent “reportage” of contemporary landscapes, as waiting areas for suggestive magic realism, actually denounce environmental emergencies, marginalization, immigration, cultural differences and, in particular, bring up bitter reflections on the annihilation of the individual, engulfed by solitude in the global era, without describing it, through evocative and symbolic images. In her photographs, the landscape and the city fuse together into a single image, bathed by natural light. Her themes are: the metaphysical of the ordinary, time, space, loss of identity and of our memory. Time passed, immobile, time that consumes things and especially that which inexorably flees, is the key to understanding her photographs which hover between reality and vision, filtered by a pictorial sensitivity and her interior language. Through apparently silent and reassuring photographs, which are never didactic, where everything seems calm and harmonious, including the elements of chaos, the spectator is invited to reflect upon the inhuman condition, and actually “yell” at the decline of our hyper-modern civilization, by presenting different subjects in which nature, social and industrial history intertwine within the scenarios of doubt, where photography is an artifice which blends into the illusion and becomes a pretext, a visual and educating experience.

Jacqueline Ceresoli