Chelonia — Ardesia Projects

CHELONIA
14.10 — 29.10.2022
Fonderia 20.9 and Spazio Alva, Verona

Like the turtle’s carapace, the camera is an object that places itself between the body and the world, modifying the way we relate to our surroundings, influencing the ways we move, the position of our body, our proximity and distance from things. Photographs, a shell of apparent fixity that enclose a beating heart, organs gurgling, a shelter of visions pumped and projected onto the future. For photography has to do with the future as much as it has to do with the past — picking up bits and traces from this moment in time, it renegotiates the past and embodies the shapes of our desires for the future. It can be prescient as much as it can be retrospective.

Chelonia, latin for turtle, brings together the work of nine artists who use photography to interact with real and imagined territories — be them the rural countryside where they grew up, the suburban landscapes they inhabit, or fabricated cityscapes made of paper parallelepipeds — walking the edge between one region and another, between staying and going, youth and growth, self and Other, work and play, life and death. Embodying an itinerant sense of being at home in the world, the turtle, title and symbol of this exhibition, reminds us that creative interaction is fundamental in building relationships with our surroundings: play is a serious business.

The exhibition Chelonia shows the displays developed by Filippo Barbero, Silvia Belussi, Greta Burtini, Susanna Corniani, Alessandro Cristofoletti, Cinzia Laliscia, Giovanni Mantovani, Sara Rinaldi and David Sarappa during Set Up! Exhibition Test Workshop 2023, held by Show & Tell Milano, directed by Benedetta Casagrande and Elena Vaninetti, in collaboration with Fonderia 20.9.