Foto/Industria, at its fifth version, proposes a variety (11 to be specific) of photographic exhibitions that enliven the town and that are in intriguing places. “FOOD” is the frequent thread of the 2021 version of Foto/Industria, the Biennial to start with-ever committed to Pictures on Market and Perform, promoted by Fondazione MAST. In ultra-contemporary places this sort of as the Fondazione MAST, which hosts the exhibition by Ando Gilardi, in historical web-sites, below the large vaults of a previous church that turned into a library or in noble palaces, pictures interact with the frescoes, making a distinction that boosts both of them.
Foodstuff is a subject matter of the utmost significance mainly because of its connections with philosophy, history, biology, science, politics and economics. And all this calls for reflections on the complexity of the “food theme”.
According to the Biennial’s creative director and curator, Francesco Zanot, “Food is a vital gauge for examining and being familiar with full civilizations. The approaches in which food stuff is manufactured, dispersed, sold, bought and consumed are continuously changing, but they usually encapsulate particular distinct functions of any period, historical period of time, or cultural and social milieu”.
“Like pictures, food is a language that incorporates and disseminates messages. What’s more, images and food items are the two closely linked to technology”, Zanot adds.
Each individual exhibition in the Foto/Industria Biennial is a “case study”, and all collectively they span a century, from the 1920s to now, dealing with, for instance, the meals market and its affect on the landscape, markets and local traditions, the marriage amongst diet and geography fishing at sea and in rivers, the mechanisation of cultivation and farming. As they are photographs about food stuff (not of food stuff), they test to appear into the complexity of a matter that involves many fields. And equally (meals and images) are likely to globalization, even though retaining their very own distinctive capabilities.
The exhibition Fototeca, at MAST, is devoted to Ando Gilardi, an eclectic protagonist of the Italian history of images, displaying his photographic reportages as nicely as elements from his legendary iconographic archive, launched in 1959. In the very centre of Bologna, one can visit the other exhibitions, like Schokoladenfabrik (1928) by Hans Finsler, just one of the fathers of aim pictures in the 1930s, M + Trails by Takashi Homma, and Favignana, which depicts tuna slaughter (1951) by Herbert Listing. The Biennial photographic itinerary involves Manufacturing unit of Authentic Wishes by Bernard Plossu and Laboratory of types by Jan Groover. Furthermore, Vivien Sansour presents Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, on the defense of biodiversity, although Henk Wildschut displays Food items, photographs of new systems for the increasingly intense and extensive food stuff sector output. And finally, there are In the Tummy of the Beast by Mishka Henner, Fisheye by Maurizio Montagna and Revenue will have to be produced, working with the major current market in Lagos in Nigeria, by Lorenzo Vitturi.
Accumulating so numerous cues on the food items marketplace will allow to selection from objective images to nevertheless daily life and minimalism, from blow-ups and abstraction to the standardization of the foods (and its peculiarities), to the speed of consumption of the methods. Not to mention metaphysical pictures, traditions and ethnography studies, curiosities, too, in purchase to emphasize the complexity of relations involving folks and food stuff. Food also considerations economic and geopolitical difficulties, awareness and information.
The Foto/Industria 2021 catalogue has a distinct slant: it can be acceptable each future to the pantry or on the bookshelf in the review. “It’s a hybrid. It’s a volume that blends the worlds of photography and delicacies produced by chef and author Tommaso Melilli, who interprets the images and themes of each individual exhibition as an unique dish”, Zanot suggests. And the catalogue, like the direct encounter of browsing the exhibitions, allow us “to investigate, beginning with the photographs, the previous and present of a matter that considerations us each working day of our lives”.
Paola Sammartano
FOTO/INDUSTRIA . V Biennial of Photography on Market and Work . Food items
Oct 14 by way of November 28, 2021
Bologna, Italy.