Family Portraits
Year: 2015 – ongoing
Device: REFLEX CANON A1
Concept and photography: Gaia Adducchio
Curated by: Gabriele Agostini & Luisa Briganti
The project here proposed is based on analog photos. All the prints are gelatin silver prints on baryta paper, realized by the author herself.
Winner of the artistic residence 2015/2016 at the Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia Adams di Rome, Italy.
Special mention at the first Biennale di Arte Moderna di Perugia, Italy, October 2016.
You can purchase my work also on:
https://www.artspace.com/artist/gaia-adducchio
“In the same way I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love.”
Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida. Reflections on photography -1980
The “Ritratti di famiglia” project is the result of a series of aesthetic choices finalized to a specific symbolic content.
The pictures represent a playful greeting from the people I love the most from a faraway dimension.
They all belong to my most intimate sphere – dear friends, close and very close family members such as my daughters, my husband and my father.
Photography is realized completely using analog techniques. It relies on double exposure on a single frame realized directly in the moment of the shutter click (and not in post-production/darkroom).
This photographic sequence reflects on the awareness, present also during the happiest moments of my life, that one day all of them will cease to exist. It represents therefore my personal attempt of recognizing time, of dealing with the fear given by this awareness.
The pictures, like a sort of “dress rehearsal”, force me to an imaginary confrontation with the inevitable eventual absence of my beloved ones. The figures, sometimes almost unrecognizable, represent the image that I could have of them in my memories to come. The recollection of my dear ones takes distance from a simple representation and describes the sense of loss and absence, giving back portraits with uncertain profiles and frequently estranged features.
The decision of shooting the double exposure directly on a single frame is not a mere formal choice, but a metaphor of our condition as human beings at the mercy of life’s events. Not being able to fully control the final result of a photo makes every single frame an “individual” with a unique and unpredictable existential path.
So called “dark stripes” are present in all those photos where the two shots were not perfectly congruent. The stripes, by sometimes revealing evocative details, other times appearing as simple geometrical figures inside the picture frame, tell of our vulnerability and the perception of chance driving our existence.
Gaia Adducchio
Unconscious shudders by weary sleepers
Petrified bodies.
Under the closed lids, made heavier by sleep, you can no longer see the greenish half-moon of their dead eyes, since darkness is too deep, the humid darkness of time in the gloom of the cave of eternity.
Petrified bodies.
Deaf, the hearing sealed by the lead of sleep and the pitch darkness of obscurity, they lie motionless.
Their gaze focused on the darkness of their own being, the darkness of time and eternity that has petrified their sleeping heart, has stopped their breath and the movement of their lungs, has paralyzed the murmur of the blood in their veins.
Petrified bodies.
Alone, the hairs of the face and the body grew, nourished by the humidity of the cave and the quite of their bodies, aroused by the ashes of oblivion and the madness of dreams.
Petrified bodies.
Alone the nails grew, faintly during sleep, crackling in the dark.
The water, allied with time, starts digging the harsh hearth of stone.
The matter slowly takes shape, is forged.
The curtain is lowered and the show can begin.
Looking for our own identity, our moment in time, we choose and put on a mask.
Today we act; on stage we improvise the representation of life, death and rebirth.
The comedy of mankind.
They say modernity has taken death from the hands of God and has given it to man. Photography makes death visible to the gaze of mortals. Of all mortals.
Photography can be collected, consulted, displayed, offered.
Gaia Adducchio’s photography is a gift that tell the tale of a tragic silence that marks the line between form and chance.
It’s a gift of silence that follows the noise of life.
It is a form of photography that indicates the road to be taken, our solitude, and suggests a direction towards the meditation of one’s self.
We just need to wait for the scene to calm for, the racket to die down to leave space to the silence.
Gabriele Agostini
Festival & Exhibitions
March 2023 – it’s part of the collective exhibition “Reminiscence” at AIFACS – All India Fine Arts & Crafts Society in New Delhi for the curatorship of Smita Biswas and Luna Arts
https://www.lunaarts.in
August/September 2022 – among the projects shown at the solo exhibition “Ritratti – Portraits” during “Segni: Festival della fotografia” in Capo di Ponte, Valcamonica curated by Graziano Filippini and Veronica Marioli
http://www.segnifestivalfotografia.it/
January 2022 – solo exhibition “Femminile Singolare: Ritratti di famiglia e altre storie” by Virgilio Patarini is shown at the Museo di Nadro in Ceto, Valcamonica, Italy
www.zamenhofart.it
Decembre 2021 – it’s part of the collective “Femminile Singolare” at P. Gallery Valcamonica di Niardo, curated by Virgilio Patarini
www.zamenhofart.it/femminile-singolare
November 2021 – among the projects shown at the solo exhibition during Prague Photo 2021 curated by Luisa Briganti and Gabriele Agostini, artistic director Iva Nesvadbova, Prague, Czech Republic
https://www.praguefoto.cz/
September/October 2021 – it’s part of the collective “Kaos antitesi del silenzio; forma, spazio, tempo” curated by Kaos 48, Fabrizio Scomparin, Stefano Nasti and Paola Cimmino
https://www.kaos48.com/
December 2020 – is part of the collective exhibition “Out of Body” on the on-line platform Stoa Collective
https://stoacollective.org/
December 2020/January 2021 – is part of the virtual exhibition “Identity” by Pepney Gallery, Cavan, Ireland
http://www.pepneygallery.com/
November 2019 – for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women as solo artist to show at the Dipartimento di Matematica e Fisica dell’Università degli studi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
http://www.uniroma3.it/
September 2019 – among the projects shown during the solo exhibition “Totem” curated by Beatrice Luzi at Art G.A.P. Gallery, Rome, Italy
http://www.artgap.it/
March 2019 – among the projects shown during the solo exhibition “Fin qui” curated by Luisa Briganti at Kromart Gallery, Rome, Italy
www.kromart.it
February 2019 – “ExpoPhoto 2019 – Italy: taste of beauty”” at the Museo di Sant’ Eulalia in Cagliari, Italy
www.expophoto.it
October /November 2017 – participates to the traveling exhibition “ExpoPhoto 2017 – Italy: taste of Beauty” for the promotion of Italian photography in the world, Rome, Lishui (China), Naples and Milan
www.expophoto.it
September 2017 – participates to the collective exhibition “Portraits without faces” organized by Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary
http://www.ph21gallery.com
August 2017 – participates to the cultural kermes “Castello di C’Arte” in Montelibretti, Italy
https://www.facebook.com/castellodicarte2012/
April 2017 – participates to the collective exhibition “Woman’s essence” organized by Musa International Art Space in Espace Commines, Paris, France
https://www.musaartspace.it/
January 2017 – TAG – Tevere Art Gallery a Rome, Italy
http://www.tevereartgallery.net/
October 2016 – wins a special mention during her participation to the first Biennale di Arte Moderna di Perugia, Italy
http://www.biennalecittadiperugia.it/it/
April 2016 – international debut at the Prague Photo 2016, Czech Republic
https://www.praguefoto.cz/
