LOOP

Since the last decade, we have witnessed a contagious, wide use of archive photos in contemporary art, a practice consolidated in recent years as more and more pre-existing documents are integrated into newly-produced images, thanks to how these resources are easily available and accessible. As time turns into a loop, past photographs redefine our present, while present photographs re-interpret our past and imagine our future. All together, these images end up feeding into a huge archive, which in turn shapes a new form of knowledge that is no longer rigidly organized, but open and fluid. The idea that an old photograph constitutes an unfathomable mystery, turns into a desire to give it new life in a subjective, sometimes consciously arbitrary way, marking the decline of the conviction that photographic images are signs that can only be decoded in one way.

Daniele De Luigi