comStampa Ghirri B1<\/a><\/p>\nThe conference offered a novel appraisal of the multifaceted work of Luigi\u00a0Ghirri (1943-1992). Bringing together several of the main Italian scholars, curators, and artists-photographers whose investigation and practice have long been in a dialogue with Ghirri\u2019s photography, it contextualized his work within the debate on Italian photography, art and aesthetics, and beyond, and established new links between his work and that of his contemporaries in Italy and abroad.\u00a0By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the conference gave a significant contribution to assessing Ghirri\u2019s role in redefining photography as part of\u00a0contemporary\u00a0artistic practice and visual culture, and his bringing to the fore issues of place and landscape in postmodern Italy.<\/span><\/p>\nProfessor Christopher Smith, Director of The British School at Rome, opened the proceedings by underlining the interdisciplinary nature of Luigi Ghirri\u2019s work and his attention to literature. The second inaugural address was given by Pippo Ciorra, Senior Curator of MAXXI Architettura, who welcomed the project and its first conference as a much-needed opportunity for scholarly discussion on Ghirri. <\/span><\/p>\nThe first session, chaired by Jacopo Benci, opened with a paper by Francesca Fabiani (Curator of the Photography Collection, MAXXI Architettura) entitled \u2018Lo sguardo che cancella l\u2019abitudine: Luigi Ghirri e il paesaggio\u2019 \/ \u2018The gaze that erases habit: Luigi Ghirri and landscape\u2019. As one of the curators of the MAXXI exhibition on Ghirri, Fabiani asserted the need to give Ghirri\u2019s work the attention and recognition it deserves. Her paper offered an investigation of Ghirri\u2019s photography of place and landscape from his early work to Viaggio in Italia <\/i>and Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia<\/i>, two seminal interdisciplinary projects for which he acted as a catalyst, bringing together many photographers, writers, artists, as well as architects, geographers and economers. <\/span><\/p>\nGiuliano Sergio, independent scholar and co-curator of the MAXXI exhibition, presented a paper on \u2018Avanguardia e architettura: due radici di Luigi Ghirri\u2019 \/ \u2018Avant-garde and architecture: two roots of Luigi Ghirri\u2019. Sergio offered a detailed analysis of the context and critical debate on art in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, with which Ghirri was familiar through his collaboration with conceptual artists in Modena (including Cremaschi, Guerzoni, Vaccari, Della Casa, Parmiggiani) and through his knowledge of the works of artists such as Paolini, Kounellis, Mulas, Ruscha, with which his art established an original dialogue.<\/span><\/p>\nIn the second session, chaired by Marina Spunta, Laura Gasparini \u2013 Curator of the \u2018Fototeca Biblioteca Panizzi\u2019 in Reggio Emilia and co-curator of the MAXXI exhibition \u2013 spoke about \u2018Luigi Ghirri tra ricerca e attivit\u00e0 curatoriale\u2019 \/ \u2018Luigi Ghirri between research and curatorial work\u2019. Her paper examined Ghirri\u2019s role as curator and theorist, and his ability to engage in dialogue and act as a catalyst for many artists, scholars and institutions in Emilia Romagna and beyond. <\/span><\/p>\nWith a presentation entitled \u2018Il cielo e il mare: Luigi Ghirri e Pino Pascali\u2019 \/ \u2018The sky and the sea: Luigi Ghirri and Pino Pascali\u2019, critic Anna D\u2019Elia (Academy of Fine Arts, Bari) drew a new parallel between the work of Ghirri and that of Pino Pascali (1936-1968), comparing Ghirri\u2019s series Infinito \/ Infinite <\/i>(1974), comprising 365 photographs of the sky, taken every day over a year, with Pascali\u2019s 32 mq. di mare circ<\/i>a<\/i> \/ Approx<\/i>. 32 square meters of sea<\/i> (1967), a series of 30 square containers full of water. D\u2019Elia argued that with these works Ghirri and Pascali addressed the question of how to capture infinity and to render temporality, and that both sought to redress the role of the artist and the relations between different arts.<\/span><\/p>\nThe first session of the afternoon, chaired by Francesca Fabiani, opened with a contribution by Vittore Fossati, one of the photographers who worked with Ghirri in the 1980s and who has continued an investigation of place and landscape to-date; its title was \u2018L\u2019otto rovesciato. Appunti per un\u2019idea di \u2018infinito\u2019 nell\u2019opera di Luigi Ghirri\u2019 \/ \u2018The tipped 8. Notes for an idea of \u2018infinity\u2019 <\/i>in Luigi Ghirri\u2019s work\u2019. By analyzing a few evocative images Fossati reflected on the importance of the notion and the symbol of the infinite in Ghirri\u2019s work.<\/span><\/p>\nCurator Elena Re gave a paper entitled \u2018Il progetto nell\u2019opera di Luigi Ghirri\u2019 \/ \u2018The project in Luigi Ghirri\u2019s work\u2019. Her paper explored Luigi Ghirri\u2019s work as an overall project that bridged the early conceptual period of the 1970s with the \u2018landscape epoch\u2019 of the 1980s. Re showed that Ghirri\u2019s experimentation with photography was informed by a coherent thought that sought to put forward his vision of the world. His art drew on great dedication and craftmanship, which he saw as a means of accessing his subject matter more deeply. In her paper Elena Re argued that Ghirri was interested in the materiality of art and in the manual work that surrounds each creative process. He enjoyed making maquettes of his work and mounting his photographs on cards or in albums in order to create his own archive \u2013 a reservoir of images through which he constructed his series. Furthermore, his curiosity and love for things was such to drive him to collect a great number of objects, many of which then became part of his photographic work, giving rise to new projects.<\/p>\n
Photography historian and author of the book Mondi infiniti di Luigi Ghirri,<\/i> Ennery Taramelli (Academy of Fine Arts, Rome) with her paper on \u2018\u2018Luoghi non comuni\u2019 di Luigi Ghirri e Stephen Shore\u2019 \/ \u2018Luigi Ghirri\u2019s and Stephen Shore\u2019s \u2018Uncommon places\u2019\u2019 offered a contrastive analysis of a number of written and visual texts by Ghirri and Shore, focusing in particular on Kodachrome <\/i>and on American Surfaces<\/i>. Her presentation highlighted the innovative nature of Ghirri\u2019s photography from the early 1970s, suggesting that it was in many ways consonant and parallel to the research on place and landscape carried out by Shore, and that both Ghirri and Shore were interested in the photography of conceptual artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha, Franco Vaccari and Franco Guerzoni. <\/span><\/p>\nThe final session was chaired by Laura Gasparini. In \u2018Luigi Ghirri, l\u2019\u2018ascolto\u2019 dei luoghi e il dialogo con gli scrittori\u2019 \/ \u2018Luigi Ghirri, listening to places in dialogue with the writers\u2019 Marina Spunta explored the consonance between Ghirri\u2019s work and that of a group of writers who worked with him in the 1980s, in particular Gianni Celati and Giorgio Messori. By focusing on the metaphor of \u2018listening\u2019 to the landscape, she argued that their individual and collaborative work contributed to recovering a broader approach to landscape that sought to establish an affective connection to places while preserving their vagueness, and to posit the aesthetic qualities of places what-so-ever, an approach recently embraced by aesthetic theories of landscape such as those of Paolo D\u2019Angelo.<\/span><\/p>\nIn his paper, \u2018Towards an iconology of Luigi Ghirri\u2019, artist-photographer\u00a0Jacopo Benci presented a detailed analysis of the iconology of Ghirri\u2019s early works (circa 1972-1981) and examined how Ghirri reflected on, and borrowed elements from the works and theories of artists such as De Chirico, Magritte, Paolini, or authors like Frances Yates and Christian Norberg-Schulz.<\/span><\/p>\nArturo Carlo Quintavalle, formerly professor of art history at the University of Parma, and for a long time Director of the CSAC (\u2018Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione\u2019), gave a paper entitled \u2018Luigi Ghirri e la ricerca concettuale in Italia e negli Stati Uniti\u2019 \/ \u2018Luigi Ghirri and conceptualism in Italy and in the United States\u2019. Quintavalle highlighted the breadth of Ghirri\u2019s cultural references, from philosophy and phenomenology (in particular Merleau-Ponty) to contemporary art, and presented him as a complex protagonist of the artistic debate of the 1970s and 1980s. He argued that the roots of Ghirri\u2019s work are to be found in the debate of Italian and American conceptualism and urged scholars to investigate in detail both Ghirri\u2019s reading of literary and theoretical texts and his artistic interests, which spanned from Renaissance painters (such as Piero della Francesca, Sassetta, Beato Angelico) to modern and contemporary artists. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Conference on Luigi Ghirri at the The British School at Rome (http:\/\/www.bsr.ac.uk\/), 9 October 2013. The first event of the British Academy-funded project was a conference entitled \u2018How to think in images? Luigi Ghirri and photography\u2019 \/ \u2018Come pensare per immagini? Luigi Ghirri e la fotografia\u2019, which was held at The British School at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,24,5,21,13,16,22,3,4,2,17,23,25,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9-october-2013","category-american-photographers","category-british-school-at-rome-conference","category-conceptualism","category-gianni-celati","category-giorgio-messori","category-italian-artists","category-italian-landscape","category-italian-photography","category-luigi-ghirri","category-maxxi","category-pino-pascali","category-stephen-shore","category-vittore-fossati"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/108"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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