GABRIELE BASILICO - Fuori Centro (Off Centre)

Gabriele Basilico was born in Milan in 1944 where he currently works and lives.

Gabriele Basilico is one of the best-known European documentary photographers. He takes photographs exclusively in black-and-white and the industrial landscape and urban areas are his privileged fields of action. His architectural studies bring him closer to the editorial area where he receive commissions to complete a broad series of works. Gabriele Basilico has completed studies on urban areas, the territory, and architecture commissioned by private and public entities.

This is how the artist describes his project for Storie urbane (Urban stories), entitled Fuori Centro (Off Centre):

"This is a photographic land, where photographic initiatives have been organised for many years and which have created the backbone of the school of thought on photography in Italy. In addition, my thoughts turn to the memory of a dear friend who was one of the key figures and he still is, in the development of photographic thinking, his name is Luigi Ghirri.

My way of working on space began in the mid-‘80s, at the time of a major project by the French government. Today, this way of working is always the same for me, and in a certain sense, it is always different. The attention, observation, and relating different places of the Western world, does not entail so much a specific aspect, but the global aspect, it concerns the complexity of this world, therefore of thought and everything that it represents. We must consider that in photography, the view impacts on what lies in front, therefore, apparently it can also be superficial, but it is simply what the image projects to the eye. In addition, the other core feature of the way I work instead, concerns, the specificity of the places, and it is as if there was an incessant and ongoing dialogue between the fact that the world we are familiar with, that we live, becomes more and more the same, and the search for this specificity. We can not ignore this fact, it represents a fundamental aspect of the search, in fact, it often becomes the main objective, also in my work. A kind of dualism exists, with which the photographer's eye, analysing in one way or in another, tries to construct a mirror, a specularity of the world.

My relationship with space and with architecture is a different relationship. As a photographer I follow paths, even anonymous paths, in places that lose their history, where the history is superimposed, where identity is lost. This phenomenon interests me very much from the physical and environmental aspect, therefore the social and identity aspect. The macro architectural projects to which the last twenty - thirty years have made us grow accustomed also in Italy as the last country in Europe, are of interest to me, as an architect, but this situation, from the reading aspect, this place of cross-breeding interests me as a photographer, as a citizen. The fact that decisive projects, implemented with an architectural quality that is absolutely not under discussion, can change the country's destiny, in a certain sense, because this destiny, which has lacked architectural projects up until now, is a destiny that leads us to a depressed situation. Therefore, as always, great architecture has been the driving force of history that has left the educational value of architecture, in time, the value of the features".

[Extract from the interview made for the video-documentary entitled Molte città, Sguardi diversi (Many towns, different Views), produced for the European Photography Week].

Some of Gabriele Basilico's more recent exhibitions

• V Biennale Internazionale di Architettura e Design di Sao Paulo, 2003
• Disegnare la città, Triennale di Milano, 2004
• L.R. 19/98, MIT Museum di Cambridge, Mass., 2004
• Arti e Architettura 1900-2000, Palazzo Ducale di Genova, 2004
• Obiettivo Napoli. Luoghi memorie immagini, Sala Dorica di Palazzo Reale, 2005
• Istanbul, IX Biennale Internazionale d'Arte di Istanbul, 2005
• Città di Torino, Galleria d'Arte Moderna, 2006