Exhibition: Luoghicomuni – Membranes

Opening: 11.04.2014 7 pm
Exhibition: 12.04. – 10.05.2014

The cell membrane is a thin shell that circumscribes the cell in all living organisms, separating it from the environment and regulating and controlling the exchange with the environment.

The artists’ collective Luoghicomuni directs its attention to the part of the area around which the city of Milan is expanding day by day with its tentacles, while the plain of Lombardy is slowly being engulfed. This process causes an apparently unconscious equation that sees the city centre as a cell and perceives the borders along the periphery as its cell wall.

The photos were taken in the areas around the terminals of the three metro lines shortly before the fourth line was opened in spring 2013, as if they wanted to freeze the situation in Milan one moment before the major changes that the city is approaching with the opening of Expo 2015. For this reason, this project will continuously develop until the planned beginning of the world fair in May 2015.

The original intention of the work is neither descriptive nor narrative, but rather was born from the authors’ need to undertake a deepening of photography as a language. In this case by strolling along an imaginary border, thus fragmented and imprecise as well as visually fraught with tension because of the contemporary photogenic nature. The emphasis is placed on the act, thus the photographer’s gesture, who, like a chemist, is searching for a greater reality through microscopic fragments in order to ultimately make them recognisable. In the moment when this intention is declared, one inevitably becomes aware of the limit imposed by the nature of man. The research is steered towards experiencing the insight rather than the result.

Luoghicomuni is a collective that was started in 2011, at first by twelve young Italian photographers. After a year of experimenting they determined a development towards thematic projects suggested over the Web. Today Luoghicomuni is concentrating on investigating photographic visual language on the basis of observing places. The collective currently consists of Alessandro Calabrese, Simone Mizzotti and Milo Montelli.