Lugano
“Luigi Ghirri – Nostalgia for the future. L’immagine necessaria”, an exhibition of 90 works, curated by Giovanni Chiaramonte and conceived by Camillo Fornasieri, director of the CMC, in collaboration with CSAC University of Parma, as part of MILANOPHOFESTIVAL, under the patronage of IULM University, the City of Milan and the Lombardy Region. For the Lombard capital, a first after the 2018 Triennale exhibition dedicated to architectural photography, composed entirely of original and vintage prints, a reconnaissance to rediscover the aesthetic anthropology of Ghirri’s photography.
Photographs from various collections, “Cardboard Landscapes”, “Breakfast on the Grass”, “Infinity”, “Journey inside an Ancient Labyrinth”, “Infinity”, are added to the vision of the large Polaroids (800x600cm), exhibited here for the first time, produced with a special machine, dreams, ironic memories, refined compositions staged by Ghirri and evoked inside the Polaroid studio in Amsterdam.
The exhibition is a cultural event in a time of crisis and transition, rediscovering the meaning of the visual canon and a novelty that represents us as self and community. The exhibition traces the author’s constant research in the face of the fragmentation of the image in powerful mass communication, the search for “the necessary image” – Ghirri’s definition – a conscious act of the present that must respond to the past, the beauty of civilisations and dare to build the future.
“It is that, in fact, it seems that everything has already been overtaken by what is called the world of simulation, that everything needs the prefix post or hyper, and that the world of the fragment, of free associations, of schizophrenia, of indifference and paradox, has already been exhausted, and that we have already entered an era of the pornographic gaze, an insatiable devourer, where there is no narrative, precisely because all narratives are possible: (. …) but in the space where it no longer seems possible to reactivate our desire to search for a possible image, an image that can still produce wonder or amazement in us.”
(Luigi Ghirri, Niente di antico sotto il sole, 1997, edited by Paolo Costantini and Giovanni Chiaramonte)