Inventario is the outcome of the annual residency organized by the first-year Photography course, curated by Luca Capuano, Alessandro Imbriaco, and Alessandro Carrer.
The residency represents a perfect correspondence between the identity of the Institute—historically engaged in cultural design rooted in social and political dimensions—and the founding vision of Archivio Atena, dedicated to the preservation and care of the material and intangible heritage of a community.
Nine photographic editorial projects narrate the historic center of Atena Lucana:
-
S. Ciro Display — Sofia Cambiaggio
-
AA 03 001 AA 02 252 AA 01 481 — Sofia Noce, Lorenzo Urgesi, Beatrice Vincenti, Giulia Zoia
-
Life, Still — Eros Gaspardo
-
Il primo anello (o preparazione al 49esimo giorno) — Alexander Papadopoulos
-
La superficie del sotto — Davide Piro
-
Siedimi — Chiara Rebolino
-
Stracci di nubi chiare — Giorgia Rinaldi
-
Pareti — Michele Virgili
- Si spartivano lo stesso odore di superstizione — Khrystyna Shostak
Il Primo Anello (o preparazione per il 49° giorno)
The town is circled at a steady distance, its perimeter traced through rhythm and repetition. Walking becomes a metronome: a measure of time inscribed in lines, voices, and shifting borders. The paths, worn and defined, remain in constant motion, like thresholds that refuse to hold still.
Time accumulates in layers. Each instant settles upon the previous, sedimented like stone, like a city that has forgotten its origin as mountain. Within this palimpsest, a solitary figure interrupts the horizon: a cypress, silent and vertical, the traditional marker of death.
The movement around it unfolds as a choreography without resolution, an orbit that draws closer but never arrives—until the inevitable end. This cyclical trajectory recalls the Tibetan Wheel of Life, where existence turns endlessly until the cycle is broken. Here, the tree becomes both axis and symbol, bridging distance and inquiry, embodying the paradox of nearness and impossibility.
Although the cycle began with the death of a grandfather, the work bears no direct relation to mourning. Instead, it follows a larger rhythm—an inventory of place and form undertaken as part of Inventario, the annual ISIA Urbino residency in collaboration with Archivio Atena. The archive itself is dedicated to preserving both the material and intangible heritage of Atena Lucana: its architecture, its stories, its gestures, its silences. Within this collective effort, the work contributes a fragmentary reading of the town’s landscape, aligning personal inquiry with the act of communal preservation.
The photographs were realized in large format and printed on silver gelatin paper, granting the images a dense, tactile surface, scaled to the human body. Yet their surfaces bear scars: the negatives were aged and partially destroyed by mold even before exposure. This deterioration—normally seen as loss—becomes part of the process, an active agent in the work. The mold inscribes its own temporality onto the image, collapsing past and present, entropy and creation.
Light becomes matter; matter becomes memory. Each print carries weight, as though it were not only a document of place, but also a shard of the cycle itself—suspended between disappearance and persistence, movement and stillness.
The town is circled at a steady distance, its perimeter traced through rhythm and repetition. Walking becomes a metronome: a measure of time inscribed in lines, voices, and shifting borders. The paths, worn and defined, remain in constant motion, like thresholds that refuse to hold still.
Time accumulates in layers. Each instant settles upon the previous, sedimented like stone, like a city that has forgotten its origin as mountain. Within this palimpsest, a solitary figure interrupts the horizon: a cypress, silent and vertical, the traditional marker of death.
The movement around it unfolds as a choreography without resolution, an orbit that draws closer but never arrives—until the inevitable end. This cyclical trajectory recalls the Tibetan Wheel of Life, where existence turns endlessly until the cycle is broken. Here, the tree becomes both axis and symbol, bridging distance and inquiry, embodying the paradox of nearness and impossibility.
Although the cycle began with the death of a grandfather, the work bears no direct relation to mourning. Instead, it follows a larger rhythm—an inventory of place and form undertaken as part of Inventario, the annual ISIA Urbino residency in collaboration with Archivio Atena. The archive itself is dedicated to preserving both the material and intangible heritage of Atena Lucana: its architecture, its stories, its gestures, its silences. Within this collective effort, the work contributes a fragmentary reading of the town’s landscape, aligning personal inquiry with the act of communal preservation.
The photographs were realized in large format and printed on silver gelatin paper, granting the images a dense, tactile surface, scaled to the human body. Yet their surfaces bear scars: the negatives were aged and partially destroyed by mold even before exposure. This deterioration—normally seen as loss—becomes part of the process, an active agent in the work. The mold inscribes its own temporality onto the image, collapsing past and present, entropy and creation.
Light becomes matter; matter becomes memory. Each print carries weight, as though it were not only a document of place, but also a shard of the cycle itself—suspended between disappearance and persistence, movement and stillness.
*27 stills from “Il Primo Anello (o preparazione per il 49° giorno)“
*Installations of “INVENTARIO” in the church of San Ciro (AT)