Franco Martelli Rossi
January 5, 2021
Alessandro Gallo
January 7, 2021
Gaia Magoni
(Ferrara, 1970)
After graduating in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in 1998, she began to collaborate with Raffaello Scatasta, realizing and attending the publication of photographic projects on behalf of public administrations such as the Province of Ancona, and the University of Ferrara.
She was contract professor of the Territory and Environmental Representation course at the Faculty of Architecture of Ferrara from 2001 to 2007; during this experience he offered the students the opportunity to investigate the city and the territory with the instrument and the poetics of photography.
At the same time, he carries out a personal research on the relationship between representation and the city, through language and video and photographic storytelling.
In particular, she is interested in investigating the expressive possibilities offered by contemporary technologies, to interpret and tell the city, the architecture and the territory.
This research is not systematic or documentary, on the contrary, it is constantly evolving and develops following paths suggested by different artistic languages, not necessarily figurative.
“Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach."
(Walker Evans))
Meriggiare pallido
"Meriggiare pallido e assorto" is the title of a well-known poem by Eugenio Montale, and from the adjective "pallido" (pale) I found the suggestion from which the idea of the photographic project was born. The photographs were taken along the Adriatic coast in the province of Ferrara, in the places described by Luigi Ghirri between the seventies and the end of the eighties. I wanted to tell the barely mentioned colors of the sand and the sea in the soft light of autumn, places, au contraire, saturated with color during the Italian summer. Light and color are inextricably dependent on each other and constitute the center of my expressive research, through which to represent a reality that is only evoked, never described. In this sense, photography becomes not only a tool for narrating the contemporary landscape (in this specific case), but also the medium capable of offering contaminations between different artistic expressions, to achieve always surprising and, sometimes, unexpected results.
This is the concept
"Hello everyone, I'm Gaia Magoni, I'm an architect and I want to talk about the techniques used to create the photographic project "Meriggiare Pallido". As written in the presentation of the project, the images are characterized by subtle, desaturated colors, obtained by increasing the exposure times. In some cases, I have also employed neutral density filters to limit or eliminate human presence. Furthermore, some images are deliberately out of focus, suspended in their imperfect being. All images are digital, taken with a medium format camera and using a moderate wide angle, a 35mm; they were taken in the last weeks of September, around 1 pm, on days characterized by a pale sun, with diffused light and no contrasts. The images thus obtained are inspired by expressive modes typical of other representation techniques (painting, watercolor), so as to create contaminations and are part of my personal research on the possibilities offered by the photographic medium. I hope you will be interested in my work. Thank you all."