The stations have a memory. Even if they are transit spaces, even if people pass through them mostly hastily, even if they are non-places . It is a dynamic memory that lives in the wake of what is past and which at the same time projects itself towards what is leaving.
At the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome , from 16 September to 1 November 2022, the exhibition The Memory of the Stations, created by Archivio Luce Cinecittà in collaboration with Fondazione FS Italiane, tells this elusive yet so concrete reality – daily, impregnated with gestures and exchanges – drawing on historical shots, an unpublished photographic project all female and the pen of eight great writers. Images from the Luce Archive, enriched by photographs from the FS Foundation, are linked to the stories of eight well-known writers to reconstruct, through the privileged point of view of otto Italian railway stations, the history of the country. But there is a figure graceful, graceful and scarlet that hovers, draws trajectories, stitches cities, stations, situations.
Yes, because if the “how it was” is entrusted to the precious archive material, the “how it is” is offered by the gaze of author of a young photographer, Anna Di Prospero, who has reinterpreted the same railway stations with her shots made specifically for the project, offering a contemporary and, for the first time, feminine reading.
In selecting the immense Archivio Luce, Chiara Sbarigia, new president of Cinecittà , learned that they did not exist, in the long period of time taken in examination, images made by female photographers. He then decided to make use of the work of a young artist, albeit already established, like Anna Di Prospero, so that through her special objective she would return a necessary also female point of view of the world of stations explored by show.
© Claudia Foresti for Interni Magazine
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