SPORCO

Sporco presents a site-specific installation of photographic works by Chiara Bandino, Francesco Biasi, Stefano Conti, Nicolò Lucchi, and Gloria Pasotti. Conceived and curated by the artists themselves, the exhibition explores how the transience of the photographic image manifests itself through gestures, archives, diaries, archeologies, notes, and memories. A cross-disciplinary body of experimentation and contamination between image and matter.

Sporco is the plural vision of a shared creative process, born from the desire to use and give new life to waste and reclaimed materials. Metal tools, scraps of plexiglass and wood, print waste, expired photographic paper, become frames and supports within the installation in Spazio Contemporanea (Brescia, Italy) and, at the same time, serve as inspiration and guidance in the choice and creation of the exhibited photographic material. The images have undergone an evolution throughout the creative process, transitioning through both conventional and unconventional means, and transforming through curious experimentation. The methods, as well as the themes and subjects, are linked by the concept of “dirt” (sporco in Italian).

Accustomed to understanding the world through images that mediate reality, one may find themselves disoriented in front of the photographs presented in the exhibition. It is “dirty” photography, not decipherable in defined subjects or technically perfect, but with symbolic value and an introspective, indistinct atmosphere. The dirty image thus presents itself as a disruption in the flow of ordinary, everyday photography, in contrast with cleanliness, perfection, and precision.

Chiara Bandino sensitively explores the importance of details, small gestures, and changes that shape the perception of time and space. The viewer is invited to slow down and, with a keen eye, capture the beauty and meaning hidden in the simplest things, to understand the complexity of the world and the value of what we build every day. Through her subtle and contemplative poetics, she shows us the hidden rhythm of life, where in every detail lies a universe of possibilities.

Francesco Biasi’s work can be seen as a path intertwining images, materials, and installations to reflect on the concept of shelter, offering a synthesis of the many forms it can take. The installation in the first room – eight building props supporting an image of a dog – combined with the rework of images from a private Russian archive, becomes a layered reflection on home: not only a physical space, but a symbolic place where memory and craftsmanship meet to build a story that belongs to everyone.

Stefano Conti’s research, on the other hand, explores themes related to archaeology, museology, and the relationship humans have with objects. He uses intuition and playful gestures as tools that allow him to interact with both the uncertainty that permeates traces of the past and with those places that contain multiple historical narratives.

Nicolò Lucchi’s practice has always questioned the limits of the photographic medium. In particular, his desire to push the boundaries and tangible aspects of the camera leads him to explore the relationship between images and time: an investigation that, in his latest works, extends to personal memory and the landscape around him, developed through experimentation with new printing materials. In his works, photography becomes a tool for deconstructing reality and reassembling it, giving it new meanings.

Finally, Gloria Pasotti revisits her personal archive of memories: images, texts, and drawings move from the pages of her diary and her paper zines to new photographic and non-photographic supports. Her practice stages a romantic, physical, and layered imaginary, with an enigmatic and sentimental gaze on emotional relationships and the natural landscape. A constellation of timeless and spaceless visions that represent the need to recognize in others a tangible sign of our existence.

Sporco showcases different approaches to artistic and photographic production, presenting a creative process where there are no limits to the possibility of contamination between elements: images, frames, and supports pass from being individual objects to a single subject-installation. The works of the five artists dissolve linear and referential photographic narratives and merge into a single reality, also dirty.