ATTO BASE
photography
exhibition
18.05 / 22.05
+ Rotterdam Photo Festival
“There is a difference between land, which is earth, and landscape, which signifies a kind of jurisdiction. It always meant the framing of an image …
The word originally came from the Dutch and had to do with making pictures. From the earliest time, it has been loaded with wishful thinking”
"Of the Land and Us: cartography of oblivion"
is a photographic project that maps a series of territories altered by men, in which the externalities produced by the infrastructures for extraction, production, transformation or storage of food, building materials and data are captured.
This visual investigation is intended as a phenomenological portrait of a system that has led to a physical and permanent alteration of geographies and ecosystems, and as a starting point for discussing new approaches.
The focus of the photographs is on the physicality and presence of what is usually hidden by our capitalist system, and on the impact that these structures have on the territories and their identities.
The project was selected by the Rotterdam Photo Festival and will be on show from 18 to 22 May 2022.
food
stone
data
The projects superimposes photos taken in different sites around the world, to map drawings and Google Earth images, in a dialogue/contrast that aims to generate a connection across scales and time. A map usually describes territories, something belonging to geological eras; seeing man made transformations captured from space or in the contour line drawings of a mountain, gives another perspective on the entity and he impact of human activity.
The interweaving of images on drawings or aerial maps reflects the fragmented experience that we usually have of a territory, compared to the omniscient paralell view of the satellite. This very dichotomy is the personal point of view assumed while carrying out this photographic research.
The exhibition itself took on the formal aspects of maps, using the folding to hide and reveal images, and the paper to give it a sense of temporarity, as this body of work is to be considered a work in progress forever, a tool used to trying to read, decode and understand our relationship with the planet.
