milanopiazzaduomo

At the Museo del Novecento, photos by Gabriele Basilico and Marina Ballo Charmet are an opportunity to reflect on the different ways we can perceive and relate to architectural and urban contexts.

Gabriele Basilico
Piazza Duomo in Milan is an iconic but contradictory place: an old city centre but also a huge void, a monumental but composite space and much trafficked but little lived in. A cliché location often adopted in official pictures, it is so typified that people rarely look at it – which is what makes the Gabriele Basilico and Marina Ballo Charmet milanopiazzaduomo photographic exhibition at the Museo del Novecento so striking.
Marina Ballo Charmet
Top: Gabriele Basilico, Milano 2011. Pure Pigment Print, 2015 ed. 4-10, 130 x 130 cm. Above: Marina Ballo Charmet, Piazzaduomo 2011. Colour print from negative. Series of 7 photos cm 24,3 x 37 each

The two artists went and had a good look at Piazza del Duomo – doing so through different and complementary eyes, such that, in milanopiazzaduomo, the dialogue between their works is also a conversation on photography, its language and its intentions. The exhibition is in a room of the Arengario with a large window overlooking the very square itself, turning this also into a comparison between the reality and its portrayal. This venue means that Basilico and Ballo Charmet’s visions are supplemented by a third one, our own.

The exhibition originated as a joint project following encounters between the two photographers and their conversations with Marco Belpoliti.

Gabriele Basilico
Gabriele Basilico, Milano 2011. Pure Pigment Print, 2015. Ed. 1-10, 100 x 130 cm
Gabriele Basilico’s large b/w photographs were taken by day from on high, at the top of the cathedral. His clear and precise gaze moves amongst the spires, highlighting their verticality. With the special sensitivity for architecture he has always manifested, he has photographed the dual construction of the Arengario, Piazza Diaz and the surrounding buildings, his lens planing over the area’s distinctive large central voids. His is a sweeping vision but for once, in this series, Basilico does not expunge the passers-by, including them in the picture. Tiny as they are, they magnify the proportions of the square and its buildings.
Marina Ballo Charmet
Marina Ballo Charmet, Piazzaduomo 2011. Colour print from negative. Series of 7 photos cm 24,3 x 37 each
Marina Ballo Charmet exhibits a set of photographs and videos taken low down, at child’s-eye level. For one of her videos, L’Alba, created using a stationary camera, the artist filmed the Duomo during the passage from night to day and in real time, for 50 minutes. It is drizzling with rain and the large granite paving is shiny and reflecting. The light pervades it, the city awakens and the square starts slowly to fill again with people. A sequence of photographs shows the square again during the passage from the darkness of night to the light of day, but photographed in reverse compared with the first video.
Marina Ballo Charmet
Marina Ballo Charmet, Piazzaduomo 2011. Colour print from negative. Series of 7 photos cm 24,3 x 37 each

A second video follows the rectangular perimeter of the space: the artist wanders with her camera positioned at thigh level. Her method of figuration becomes part of a corporeal experience and you have the impression that the lens alone is scanning the surrounding space. When describing this approach which decentralises the angle of the shots, Ballo Charmet speaks of a lens turned into a “body-eye”.

In all these works, Marina Ballo Charmet’s lens does not focus on a specific point; it does not analyse. It perceives the sense of suspension in the deserted square by night, the pervading light and the first movements of a city reawakening - phenomena that are repeated every day. The ordinary life of the city but an ordinary that is normally barely noticed. Presences and details do, however, emerge: the legs of a passer-by, a pink-clad figure sitting on the ground in the middle of the square and the darkness of the night giving way to the developing day. Almost like the artist’s alter ego.

Marina Ballo Charmet
Marina Ballo Charmet, L'alba 2014-2015. Video stillframes

The catalogue ends with an essay by Carlo Bertelli on Piazza Duomo and its transformations.

The exhibition is an opportunity to reflect on the different ways we can perceive and relate to architectural and urban contexts, and on the subject of the old square, a collective space par excellence although not always seen as such today.

© all rights reserved

until 26 Februry 2016
milanopiazzaduomo. Marina Ballo Charmet, Gabriele Basilico
curated by Marco Belpoliti and Danka Giacon
Museo del Novecento, Milan

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