REFLECTIONS – INCLUDING POLITICAL ONES – ON LIVING
Stefan Milosavljević, born in Serbia
In Carnivous Carnival, too, the dimensions of play and disguise are essential. It is a reflection on the relationship between prey and predator, on the capacity for camouflage and penetration of every form of violence and cruelty, especially in their subtlest forms, which become fascinating even while remaining bestial.
Mohamed Keita, born in Côte d’Ivoire
This autobiographical narration, though never explicit in Mohamed Keita’s work, is essential if we are to understand why his gaze dwells on certain details and the direction it takes. The photographer left his native land at the age of 14 and undertook, alone, a journey through Guinea, Mali, Algeria, the Sahara, Libya and Malta. After three years he reached Rome, now aged 17. He experienced living on the street and immortalizes this same street with his attentive, unrhetorical gaze. He portrays his Rome, sunny and luminous, and gathers traces of those passing through or who live there.
Nicolas Vamvouklis, born in Greece
In 2016, Berlin Zoo took its flamingos into care as a cautionary measure after the first cases of H5N8 ’flu were confirmed in Germany. Filming this moment in a loop that repeats ad infinitum and keeping a birdwatcher’s distance, as an observer external to the system, Nicolas Vamvouklis traces a parallel between human and animal society, underlining elements of dominance, oppression and exclusion. He also refers, obviously, to his own native island, Lesbos, one of the focal points of the migratory flows and of the European humanitarian crisis, as well as a paradise for photographers of birds.
Underlining this relationship, the environmental installation Granted there is a wall, what’s going on behind it? gathers a series of objects that accompany the artist in his movements between Greece and Italy and that summarize the relationship between inhabited space, object and body. They are elements that appear shorn of context in the exhibition space, but which in reality are found everywhere: they often belong to other lives, other homes. They are the reification of persons and moments that were essential to the artist’s formation.
