A Place to Stay
Photographs by Alessandro Imbriaco
Curated by Renata Ferri
FOTOGRAFIA – International Festival of Rome
Among eight one-person shows by Italian artists, some emerging, others already established, Alessandro Imbriaco presents the series A Place to Stay. The show was curated by Renata Ferri. It is part of a bigger project on precarious housing, Temporarily Independent Spaces, which he has been working on for the past three years.
The work explores the conceptual fracture between the Eternal City and its new settlements . Temporary and mobile, by no means extraneous, they rise against the city’s age-old walls or improvise a new periphery. It’s a discontinuous mapping of the alternative housing models existing in Rome and a rethinking of the concept of illegal housing: not only illegal occupation but also the transformation of a place, of its functions and of its aesthetics.
Every structure harbors a human story. The lives that Imbriaco depicts are on the edges or in the heart of the city. Marginal by force or choice, they fall outside the sphere of social organization; they are metropolitan nomads, transient souls, foreigners everywhere, inhabitants of an indefinable time.
He meets men and women, and observes their lives through the places where they live; their spaces become suggestive and surreal containers of the human condition. Every picture along this path traverses reality and the present time, breaks through the invisibly boundary of these dimensions and leaves our sight free and open. This series expresses the documentary and poetic force of the contemporary world.
Alessandro Imbriaco (1980, Italy) was born in Salerno. He currently lives and works in Rome. He graduated from the Scuola Romana di Fotografia in Rome in 2005. In the last few years Imbriaco’s personal projects have explored transitory, alternative housing models in and around the city of Rome. His works have been exhibited in galleries worldwide, including at the Harlem Studio Fellowship in New York, the 10ieme Biennale Photographique in Bastia, France, and at the Festival for Young Photojournalism in Hannover, Germany. In 2010, Imbriaco was awarded the second prize at World Press Photo (Contemporary Issues). He is currently represented by Contrasto.
Emiliana Tedesco
Fotografia- The International Photography Festival in Rome, 10th edition
From septembre 23 to October 23, 2011
MACRO Testaccio _ Piazza O. Giustiniani 4
Rome
