March, 26 – April,12 2024
Works on display:
1) Print on PVC 1.00 x 3.60 m.
2) VEGA K210 photosensitive photo paper 6.5 x 9.5 cm
3) Fine art digital prints on Canson Rag Photographique, variable dimensions
The work explores practices and gestures that make up the "ritual" of the image, from latent to true photographic image, investigating broadly what an image is and what photography is.
The analogue photographic process is made up of a series of steps: first visual, then manual, and is mostly made up of expectations, discoveries and revelations. The work, with a meta-photographic character, examines the images taken from darkroom manuals which often repetitively draw a liturgical gesture that leads to the appearance of the photographic image.
Photography is elusive and at the same time material and consistent, through its creation and manipulation our desperate need to possess and make part of the reality that surrounds us "forever" is evident. A race against time and the oblivion of memory. The practice of the camera obscura cancels time and condenses it into a here and now dedicated only to the revelation of the image.
Isolated from their editorial context of images explanatory of the photographic process and inserted in an exhibition context, the proposed images are elevated to works of art, trying to arouse that "magic" of images which consists in their pre-linguistic nature, which has the power to set ourselves in motion, thus creating those primary reactions that place the images within the context of the ritual and to which we direct a sort of religiosity.
The image, the photograph, becomes an object to be cherished, venerated, and as Barthes writes in The Clear Camera "In Latin «photography» could be said «imago lucis opera expressa»; that is: image revealed, "brought out", "set up", "squeezed" (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light. And if Photography belonged to a world that was still in some way sensitive to myth, we would certainly exult in the richness of the symbol: the beloved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal: silver (monument and luxury); and furthermore it should be added that this metal, like all the metals of Alchemy, is alive."
Chiara Caredda Chiara Caredda (Carbonia, 1992) is a photographer and visual artist. She is enrolled in the degree course in Cultural Heritage and Entertainment at UniCA in Cagliari. In 2020-21 he participated as a scholarship holder in the advanced training program on the photographic image "Creating and Thinking about Photography", organized by OCCHIO in Cagliari. Since 2020 he has been on the board of Ottovolante Sulcis APS for which he takes care of educational experiences in the photographic field. His practice focuses on the mechanisms of memory and recollection through images. He uses different media, preferring the use of analogue collage, the reuse of already existing images and various off-camera and darkroom printing techniques.
photography:
Enrique Mosella