2015

The series is part of a collective work “ENDLESS VACATION project”, by CROP Collective, a research conducted on photos of holidays either found, carried out in some public archives, or among old family photographs, and through the recovery of digital photos stored on hard disks and memory cards. The whole project is a meta-photographic reflection on the way in which the different supports, analogical and digital, and the changing methods of archiving linked to them, affect at the same time the perception and formation of our shared and individual memory.
The “Ciao piccola!” series is the result of a selection made on over 2000 photos taken between the summer of 2009 and 2014 in Liguria, in various locations on the Riviera dei Fiori: from Imperia to Ventimiglia, passing through Sanremo, Bordighera and Vallecrosia.
The images were made with different digital machines, reflex and compact cameras. The photos, taken on vacation, were conserved and archiviated on an external hard disk, in a folder nominated photo_holidays, divided into sub-folders named with the year of reference. Starting from the different formats due to the use of different cameras, to give uniformity to the series, I decided to apply a square format to all the chosen images. This led me to reinterpret the frame of each photo to decide which parts of the image to cut. Over time, the snapshots have begun to acquire a new visual identity. And, looking at all the material, despite the 6-year time frame in the realization of the images, a sort of common thread seems to emerge as a whole. The work presents itself to my eyes as a coherent and compact corpus, capable of transmitting what for me is part of the soul of these places.

“ENDLESS VACATION project”, which gave rise to an independent publication, has been exhibited in the PHOTOFESTIVAL 2015 within the event “HTTP. HyperText Transfer Photography”. The event, set up in the industrial spaces of the Technological Pole of Brianza, where once the historical Autobianchi Cars plants were located, has gathered together various authors and different creative realities in order to reflect on the hypertextuality assumed by images in the current mass and multi-media society, and to underline how technological changes affect their production, conservation, sharing and use. Considering the particular context, a section of the exhibition will also be dedicated to different ways of photographically recounting industrial transformations, also thanks to archive photos made available by the adjoining Autobianchi Museum.
The “Endless Vacation” project has also been included in the Archive of the F.M.F. (Malerba Fund for Photography), which aims to select the most artistic trends interesting developments in the Italian photographic panorama of the twenty-first century. As part of the activities of the Malerba Fund, CROP Collective was also invited to exhibit Endless Vacation as a “special project”, and to hold a Lecture on Photographic Collectives in Italy and abroad, as part of the important International Photo Project event.

EXHIBITION
2015 – with ENDLESS VACATION project by CROP Collective – HTTP. HyperText Transfer Photography, Desio (MB) – Milano Photofestival 2015
2015 – with ENDLESS VACATION project by CROP Collective – INTERNATIONAL PHOTO PROJECT (special mention ARCHIVIO FMF_ Fondo Malerba per la Fotografia) – Spazio Soderini, Milan