Turin, October 21 (Askanews) – The port as a place of constant transformation, in that dimension Italo Calvino called "exchange," which Anastasia Samoylova's precise and sentimental photography conveys in a deeper dimension. This is the exhibition "Harbor," curated by Emanuela Mazzonis and hosted at the Gallerie d'Italia in Turin. "A great variety of things passed through these ports," the photographer said.
If I think of historical examples like Venice, where the entire city is, in fact, a port, or hypermodern cities like Rotterdam, extremely efficient in terms of CO2 emissions, very attentive to rising sea levels and constantly evolving in this direction, a truly interesting range of cases emerges." The images include ships, large structures, but also people, minimal stories that hark back, for example, to the imagination of Edward Hopper. Above all, there is the aquatic dimension, with its power never fully understood.
And all of this ultimately becomes part of the broader discussion that the Intesa Sanpaolo museum is pursuing on the theme of photographic landscapes. "Today," added Michele Coppola, Director of Art, Culture and Historic Heritage at Intesa Sanpaolo, "the journey begun a few weeks ago with Luca Campigotto is completed. It's clear that talking about travel, talking about the discovery or rediscovery of the vast Europe allows you to say that that journey actually ends in the rooms that host the work of Anastasia Samoylova.
And it's equally clear that thinking about Europe necessarily means thinking about ports, crossroads, places that can be renounced for the economy, for people." It's clear that the exhibition also explores the infrastructure of the global economy and, by extension, the relationship with nature and the planet, including its human component. But beyond all this, there's also a sense of mystery, of unveiling the invisible, like a Venetian photograph that, in its simplicity, is a perfect portrait of the city's way of life. "I hope the project manages to convey that sort of mysterious aura that characterizes many of these ports," Samoylova concluded. "Not everything can be interpreted literally; there's an almost mystical, perhaps even metaphorical, component. After all, ports are surrounded by a truly powerful mythology." And this mythology, we sense as we walk through the exhibition, is ancestral and, at the same time and without contradiction, profoundly contemporary. (Leonardo Merlini)
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