per l’Arte

Prospettive

Cristina de Middel
Antipodes

Tosetti Value is proud to continue its visual research on the globalized world, presenting the project “Antipodes” by the Spanish artist Cristina de Middel. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, celebrates the five years of the project “prospettive – l’economia delle immagini”, concluding “at the antipodes”, in the unspoiled land of New Zealand, the first journey taken by the Family office through the globalized landscapes of Europe, America, Asia and Africa.

Cristina de Middel challenges the codes of documentary photography in order to involve the public in a game of mirrors that does not reveal reality itself, but its possible interpretations. De Middel always draws her inspiration from a real element, coming from the experience, whether collective or individual. Her narrative starts here, revealing itself in different ways, but always aiming at inviting the public to ask themselves whether what they see is true or false, whether it is the faithful representation of an event, a situation, a place, or whether it is a reconstruction, a deception, a fantasy.

This is the result of a reflection on the status of photography, on its underlying ambiguity, and at the same time on the mechanisms of information and the structures of vision (a reflection that, moreover, not by chance unites de Middel to the two artists who preceded her on these walls, Mishka Henner and Noémie Goudal).

If in other cases – first of all the best-known cycle “Afronauts” – the artist emphasized the collective dimension of these topics, in this cycle, presented here for the first time in Italy, de Middel literally explores her relationship with the canonical genre of photography, namely that of landscape. The artist starts from a paradox, identifying the place furthest from her land of origin, building on this distance the further paradox of a photography that desperately tries to reach an impossible completeness, able to see everything and to give everything back. The result is the opposite: an even more fragmented and almost indecipherable vision. The distance from home becomes nearly the metaphor of the distance between photography and reality, the confirmation of its being first of all representation and interpretation, not documentation. To confirm this aspect, here comes the choice of doubling the mirroring element (which also implies an idea of looking inwards, towards one’s own identity) and the presence of the underlying map, which is in turn destined to a double function. On the one hand it underlines the idea of transposing reality into symbolic language, on the other hand it shows the possible extreme consequence of this approach, the metamorphosis of the world into an abstract pattern, which replaces the small, disordered portions of reality that the camera can capture, with an orderly, infinite different repetition.

Walter Guadagnini

A project by:
Tosetti Value per l’Arte

In collaboration with:
CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia

Exhibition catalogue