ART CITIES:Milan-Stefano Graziani
Trained as an architect, Stefano Graziani teaches the history and technique of photography at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Trieste and has been working for five years in the photographic lab of the Design and Art Faculty at IUAV, Venice, as well as organising different workshops at universities throughout Europe.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fondazione Prada Archive
The exhibition-project “Questioning Pictures” by Stefano Graziani, explores photography as a tool for narration, cataloguing and reinterpretation and includes a new body of works commissioned by Fondazione Prada. In this project photography reconnect and combine works that are far apart in space and time, and that are often impossible to physically transfer from one place to another. It also operates as a tool that through subtle deviations, minimal alterations and personal interpretation, unhinges traditional archival and cataloguing systems in order to grant new visibility, and therefore new life, to the documents, materials and artworks conserved in Museum Collections. Stefano Graziani investigates archival and conservation systems in Museums focusing on the ambivalent relationship between photography and the museum object. Photography navigates an ambiguous territory in Graziani’s work: on one hand he documents diverse materials like drawings and architectural models, books, photographs and paintings; on the other, he embarks on an interpretative path through the careful use of light and camera angles, as well as the inclusion of disturbing elements in his shots. His photographs not only shed light on museum collections and archives usually denied to visitors, but reactivate them according to entirely subjective logic and perspectives. The exhibition set up was designed by studio OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen as a system of colorful, modular screens laid out across the two levels of the space, creating unexpected visual and semantic combinations between the photographs and the objects represented. A model of a building by Aldo Rossi is connected to a drawing by Gordon Matta-Clark, a late 19th Century photo album of Pompeii is set alongside a plastic model of the Pantheon on display at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London; a plaster by Antonio Canova conserved in Possagno dialogues with Lucas Cranach’s “Three Graces”, the maquette for a utopian project by Cedric Price is associated with a table prototype designed by Mies van der Rohe. This heterogeneous collection of objects and artworks is united through Graziani’s thinking, as the artist transforms them into disorienting and unexpected still lifes. As the curator of the exhibition emphasizes, “The exhibition is a sort of crash test designed to assess the museum’s ability to resist external attacks and increase its permeability in proportion. Graziani transforms the invisible into something visible, preventing these terms from being subsequently reversed, and thus sheds light on one of the primary mechanisms through which museums generate and control their power”.
Info: Curator: Francesco Zanot, Fondazione Prada, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Piazza del Duomo, Milan, Duration: 9/11/17-26/2/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 14:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.fondazioneprada.org
