Francesca Loprieno selected works
francescaloprieno.com francescaloprienoworld.tumblr.com fr.loprieno@gmail.com
Lives and works in Italy. In her projects she prefers using the languages of photos and videos in order to analyze social problems such as the human inadequacy to accept and to adjust him/herself to the modern ordinary empty spaces, along with the loss of him/herself and human rights, problems often related to the experience of the journey. The journey conceived not only as crossing through a physical space but also as a mental act involving personal and collective memory, an occasion in which there’s the loss of senses and the awareness of time, which no longer belongs to the interiority of the individual, but becomes an essential condition of life.
IDENTI-KIT The work “IDENTI-KIT” (2008-2013) collects images of young women portrayed in a diptych - front and profile (a metaphorical reference to the mug shots made by police). The title, written with a dash in between, brings us to an idealistic identity kit made of items from the symbolic feminine universe. Female accessories and clothes used as blindfold, a curtain in front of the eyes of the portrayed women. Each picture of the sequence shows only the covered eyes, a contrast with the usual representation of the Islamic woman completely covered but the gaze. So, the representative method theme is placed in the center of the feminine identity smothered by the western stereotypes or by the eastern taboos
inside the universe of the common homogenization. The items used as blindfold on the female subjects are clothes that women cannot leave behind so easily, the clothes close them in world made of recurring, mainstream, weirdo and consumer gestures. A world that isn’t free, as far as it looks. The stocking, the waistline, the cooking glove, the garter, the ribbon, the mask, the necklace, the measuring tape, the neckerchief, the wedding veil express a strong womanliness in a symbolic way characterized by the resemblance between the women habits in both sides of the world, eastern and western.
Photographic exhibition of pictures 30 x 30 cm Exhibited at: International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Tese di San Cristofoto, Venezia 2011 International of Contemporary Art Shades of Women, Teatro Due, Roma 2012 International of Contemporary Art Senso Plurimo, Cantieri Teatrali Koreya, Lecce 2013
IDENTI-KIT Exposition
International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Tese di San Cristofoto, Venezia 2011
International of Contemporary Art Shades of Women, Teatro Due, Roma 2012
International of Contemporary Art Senso Plurimo, Cantieri Teatrali Koreya, Lecce 2013
watch video
TRANSITIONS Transizioni
This long photographic sequence whose name is “TRANSIZIONI - TRANSITIONS”, the focus had been pointed toward an empty street, without any trace of architecture, to capture every single light shade, every perceptual mutation, every change caused by the presence of the human being and the endless ordinary life stream. People and little crowds (1,2, or more persons) moving, going, coming, crossing obliquely to the left or to the right, taking their time (somebody runs, others walk, others stay...).
Photographic exhibition of pictures 12 x 12 cm Exhibited at: Nuova era Museum, Bari, 2008 Laboratori Visivi Roma, 2013
Each one of them characterizes the space for a short and less short part of time. The speed of the shutter click is enough to give another shape to the city (in this case Rome, Paris, Krakow, Warsaw, London...), the sole presence of the human being is the cause of a transformation of the place. The research wants to represent the unstable metropolitan condition, since - quoting Bukowski: “People are the best show in the world. And you don’t even pay for the ticket”.
TRANSITIONS Exposition
Nuova era Museum, Bari, 2008
BEYOND THINGS Oltre le cose
I deem the edge represents the borderline of another edge. I deem it is the arrival point when another trail begins... I deem it the alpha and the omega, it point to the future, the exact point in which the present begins. I deem that a door may be closed in the same moment in which it is opened. I deem that between the end of an edge and the beginning of another there is a story that always deserves to be told. A story with a past, a present and a future. After a borderline has been traced, a story begins; I walked the path toward its end. A place where the path of a man gets away and becomes a dark spot, a society’s dark spot that traces the beginning of another path.
Photographic exhibition different sizes Exhibited at: Casa della fotografia, L’Aquila 2013 Fotografia Femminile, Osservatorio Nazionale 2014
Houses, countryside, neglected places; each one of them traced the beginning and the end of something at the same time. A neglected place, a shabby space, let us think that there, there was a past - the future of yesterday, there is a present - the future of today, and there will be a future - the future of tomorrow. A hymn for an untold future, a future that can be lived, that we cannot stop with a gaze, but we can walk with it, waiting for it’s transformation. This is my outlying trail in the south of Bari, where everything appears with a fragile end and beginning. The journey into these placeless places brings me to an edge, into the things, into the life, into the history, into the shiver of the living man close to the edge, a step far from the unknown: the future.
more info
HOVER LANDSCAPES Paesaggi sospesi
The project “HOVER LANDSCAPES” born from my personal need of putting up my inner “vision” of the relationships I live with the surrounding landscape. Bari and Apulia, Rome and Lazio. The cities where I have lived and toward which I move every day. Little everyday scenarios, reality suspension, visions suspended, to reflect the relationship man/ environment. The parallelism of the detachment and belonging, played around the empty place of existence. The landscape is the suburbs, the background of culture, the dust, the forgotten...
Photographic exhibition of pictures 60 x 80 cm Exhibited at: Castello Svevo, Bari 2011 Studio Arte Fuori Centro, Roma 2012 Casa della fotografia, L’Aquila 2013
ruins and debris. When the human being appears, it becomes my visions, becomes one of my imaginary story, it is everything I think during my movements. The need of stopping the time, laying it off, brings me around and let me imagine people (mainly women) who perform actions, like on a theatre stage (in the case the real scenario), they move with the vagueness of the tangible and imaginary, playing a double comparison of time, lives between the absence and the presence.
HOVER LANDSCAPES Exposition
Studio Arte Fuori Centro, Roma 2012
more info
HANGING IN THE BALANCE In bilico
The diptych “HANGING IN THE BALANCE� is the lucid and visionary mise-en-scene of the current precarious balance, of our precarious society, where love, feelings, reactions live inside inner and non-communicative worlds. Hanging into an unshaped and unmirrored sky, on an unusual broken but still solid thread, the action of two characters takes place, they try to reach each other as for mutual help, but they are still divided and hanging between dream and real world, between uncertainty and persistence, between determination and doubt...
Photographic exhibition of pictures 80 x 80 cm Exhibited at: Winner at the Alliance Francaise Internation Contest, 2010 Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, 2011 This work is partially part of a private collection.
more info
NOWHERE LANDSCAPES Passaggi nel nulla
A travel. A transit. The transformation of objects, of landscapes, of individual. The suburb, with its fleeting transit, represents the soul of what is going to change. What do we leave behind us, during our transit? I took pictures of the landscape during my several movements between Bari and Rome. The routine made from this continuous travel, made me think about and observe the transit and landscape. Everything appears the same even during it’s endless transformation. The houses are always in the same place; some areas are under construction and let us think about a sudden “urban center”. It’s some years I have collected notes about my movements, trains, planes, walking directionless. The movement helps me to discover traces of a quotidian non-visible imaginary. A thin line that blends the moment with the event. What changes? What will we leave after our transit?
Photographic exhibition of 12 pictures 80 x 60 cm Exhibited at: Castello Svevo, Bari 2011
Momentary traces of a center-suburb that repeat themselves at each stop. Indefinable notes of an unknown transit, but present. Visions, hints, transformations. I took pictures behind the window, behind a glass (full of dust, rain and experiences) and I realized that the there was also my mirrored transit on the other side of the train. “From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other”. Italo Calvino The mutation. A picture into a picture, a story inside a story, the other’s presence. This travel of 471 km by train represents the distance from me, that is from the place where I feel I have to dwell and the place where I have to live.
Artist book handmade in 2015
RANDOM NOTES Appunti per caso
Our condition in the real is just a “snap-shot” of a caught world during it’s explosion, where every relating between the elements is often lost. No consistency with the organization of our experiences. The photos follow the attempt of building a story without a real beginning and a real end. It is the “while” the protagonist. The unwrapped narrations, the thin invisible moments, tied to our daily existence are the protagonists of these images. Places, landscapes, words, people, each one of them determines a presence that during the transit leaves a deep trace (often invisible) to us, we are so busy to reach everything, but we reach nothing. Random notes is a project that was born in Paris, during the breaks, moments of thinking, refection, sudden meetings, sharing, gazes of quotidian non-sense. This is è project that was born from the observation “during” the travel. Random notes wants to show nothing but the impossible attempt to manage the real.
The project is composed of an art book including photos, texts and blank spaces though which the audience can interact cutting photos, building a story, matching texts, leaving blank spaces, can do everything he or she wants, everything, even nothing.
BEYOND -TIME Oltre - tempo
The sequence “BEYOND-TIME� collect evocative triptychs of foggy countryside spaces, where there is no man; inside the muffled silence, under sad skies, the time still. The gaze of the lens watches the grass blades, the bushes, and the crown of far trees, a still horizon. Their breath is the expanded breath of the universe. Everything is still and changing at the same time.
Photographic exhibition of 3 photos 80 x 100 cm Exhibited at: Studio Arte Fuori Centro, Roma 2012
BEYOND -TIME Exposition
Studio Arte Fuori Centro, Roma 2012
INSULAE
Man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the Earth. [...] John Donne The photographic diptych INSULAE represents the primordial relationship of coexistence between the water and the Land, both elements view the humanity as hope and landing. It is a silent dialogue between an island and a stretch of coast suspended in the fight for a place, a dimension and a space inside the indefinite space of the sea. It is a psycho-geography defensing a space, where the main protagonist is the human being in his state of being a migrant in the world.
Photographic exhibition of 2 photos, diptych 120 x 60 cm Exhibited at: Piramida of Tirana / Albania National Gallery of Cetinje / Montenegro Museum of Contemporary Art of Rijeka / Croazia Magazzino del Sale / Venezia
INSULAE
Exposition
Museum of Contemporary Art of Rijeka / Croazia
MIGRANT STATES Stati Migranti
I began to look at the sky when I realized I couldn’t watch the sea. I followed my migratory flux without being carried on by logic. Mine is a need of liberty, the possibility to recognize myself in every place. This always leads me to watch the horizon, a horizon that often included only houses, factories and dust... It was not my land; it was not my sea... So, having not the possibility to turn my eyes far away, I raised them up to the sky. The state of an uninterrupted migration (common to the most part of mankind) induced me to collect, in a way almost obsessive, little fragments of sky and sea, according to the cities I passed through and that I still shall go across.
Photographic exhibition of 60 photos 12 x 12 cm Exhibited at: Casa della fotografia, L’Aquila
The skies of Rome and Paris, cities where I lived and I like often to return, and the sea of my native land, Apulia. Small format images, slight appearances of architectures defining the space and at the same time effacing it. I have traced out a profile (the profile of my sight) putting a distance between me and the things, and I realized that those same things belong to me. The trees, the rocks, the branches, the sun trying to explode through the leaves, the balconies of Paris, the church of my town, each one of them is a soft indication, an evocative and suggestive nuances of my vision and of my condition of “migrant”, my condition od me blended with these elements.
work in progress
SPACES’ EDGES Limiti di spazi
Slivers of natural weakness resist to the modern solitude multiplier.
Photographic exhibition, diptych 100 x 80 and 80 x 80 cm Exhibited at: Festival di Fotografia del Paesaggio, Pescara, 2014
work in progress
Francesca Loprieno phone: +39 349 75 14 783 Graphic design: Barbara Simone _ www.barbarasimone.eu