1:26-28

MASSIMO MASTRORILLO

The photographic reading developed by Massimo Mastrorillo during his residency in Castelfranco Veneto shows a careful analysis of the relationship between contemporary landscape and narrative evocation of a story full of meaning and memory. If the fragment testifies to the original character of the places, people are the interpreters of a civil society at the service of production.

“In the 1990s, architect Stefano Boeri emphasized how the Italian landscape had been profoundly changed as a result of equally profound transformations in the country’s social fabric and habits. This wealthy, largely unregulated country had fashioned itself a landscape in its own likeness. This cutting analysis brought to mind the verses from Genesis 1:26–28: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish in the sea and over the fowl in the air, and over every living creature
that moveth upon the earth.” The philosophy of “work always and everywhere” has spread exponentially across the land, especially in the Northeast, and particularly in the Castelfranco Veneto area, which was one of the first in the region to be industrialized. The loss of identity and diffusion of the “I only care about what is profitable” subculture has
been similarly exponential. While geographical North is the direction of the Northern tip of the axis on which the Earth spins, this initially evolved and subsequently convoluted land represents the more widespread regression of the whole of Italy and the nefarious logic of profit at any cost, in a sort of loop that is impossible to escape, just as the Earth cannot avoid spinning on its own axis. Few people are portrayed in my work. They are for the most part alien presences, which leave traces or absences connected with faded memories. Memory is a luxury we cannot afford. In the silence of the factories, few written memories remain of the people who constitute the history of these places: telegraphic descriptions (married, with children, late, fired, promoted, deceased, etc.) that make us forget the sweat, emotions and enthusiasm that filled the aseptic and uninhabitable constructions left to us by the unchecked industrialization of the post-war period. In the resulting apparent desert, the signs of history stubbornly survive alongside the signs of what we were told was “development”, just as talent and enthusiasm continue to live side by side with resignation over what has been lost.” (M.M.)

Project realized as part of the artist residency “OMNE/WORK”, Castelfranco Veneto 31st May – 11th June 2016, exhibited during OMNEFEST (Museo Casa Giorgione, 13th October – 9th December 2018) and published in the book “OMNE/WORK 2016- 2018”, Lettera Ventidue, Siracusa 2018