125 photographs from the Touring Club Italiano archive
Cureted by Luca Santese; critical comment by Nicola Patruno
The exhibition draws directly on the categories of the collective imagination that the Touring Club Italiano archives have contributed to form over more than a century of history. Imaginary is an operation of creation, reinvention, dissection and recomposition of single elements of the archives. It is not, therefore, a utopian creation ex nihilo. Imaginary is the journey itself, made up of archival and artistic photographs that dialogue with each other.
The panels allow the observation of the pulsating nucleus of the imaginary in it’s continuous becoming, creative and re-creative: one recognizes not only it’s singularities, but the force that they unleash in their editing, cinematographically understood. It’s the visitor’s own imagination, nourished by the images proposed in a rigorous sequence, that produces the movement of the images. The exhibition answers the questions: what is the collective imagination? How is it formed? The operation is also, intimately subtly, subversive because it neutralizes the formation of stereotypes, which are nothing more than crystallized, rigid, reified archetypes. Immaginario calls into question the representations of the present by sinking in full, archaeologically, in the fragments of the past. The present is thus put into perspective, it is given a depth of field that projects into a longer, stratified and dense process.