Crack
For the second year, Fotografia Europea presents a project born from the collaboration with the National Dance Foundation / Aterballetto. The project departs from the classical canon of photography as documentation of the theatre event, and instead proposes a real interaction between the two disciplines – and their interpreters – starting with the shared theme of the body’s representation.
In this occasion the performance is, in the words of the choreographer Diego Tortelli “A unique occasion to give back truth and strength to the performer who faces the audience not as an interpreter in the hands of a director, but with their own truth, their story told by the body at the service of the performance, of a place, an encounter, a bond; to create a moment of intimacy with the other and with the spectator”. Starting with the condition of the dancer himself, a Paralympic fencer, which questions themes of diversity, fragility, common conceptions around the body, its appearance and its essence.
Drawing on these considerations as starting point, Jacopo Benassi constructs a sort of photographic environment, almost an atlas of the body and of its representation in image, developed between the extremes of ancient plastic arts and contemporary concrete physicality. Through a dizzying succession of figures and poses, Benassi reveals both the canon and its rupture; precisely where the theme of the normative ideal of beauty is called into question and forced to its breaking point, it introduces not only a definitive break but also its re-composition, in a new shape and starting from a new balance. Collective and personal history come together in this gallery of materials, poses and fragility that, according to the words of Antonio Grulli – author of the catalogue’s text – “speaks of humanity, and of what distinguishes humans”.
