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Le Temps des cerises, a collaborative work by the couple Lia and Paolo Aldi, transforms exhibition spaces into an anachronistic world that is both ancient and contemporary. The dialogue between the two artists and the photographs from over 150 years ago is like a centrifuge: aspirations of brotherhood and fratricidal clashes, desire for self-determination and violent repression, places and dreams that become ruins and rubble. Past events that blend and intertwine with current issues. The authors have the ambition and audacity to blend not only wax and photographs, but also art and history, humanity and atrocity, past and present.
On the walls, the works of Le Temps des cerises show reproductions of original photographs from the period of the Paris Commune in the form of unusual collages immersed in beeswax, true photographic encaustics. Lia and Paolo Aldi have chosen from hundreds of vintage photographs that depict men and women and the events of the uprising and self-government of Paris in the spring of 1871. These images, which for the first time photographically represent a revolution, also show a brazen use of this still-young technique. For the authors, the overlapping of images and texts fused together with wood, objects, cardboard, bandages, and wax is an immersion in that world of the past, experiencing it firsthand and revealing the desire for self-determination, desires, enthusiasms, and energy that permeated that reality. It is impressive how current the issues debated and legislated at that time still are today: working hours and union rights, cooperation, redistribution of wealth, women’s emancipation, the right to education, public schools, separation of church and state, equality and rights of men and women of all nationalities and backgrounds. At the same time, there is also profound grief for the thousands of deaths caused by the battles, left on the barricades and caused by the extremely violent final government repression.
In addition to the works on the walls, the installation La Commune de Paris is made of waxed thread and cardboard with a development of nine linear meters. It collects and shows the memory operation made on social networks, in 2021 and 2022, day by day from March 18 to May 29: a synthetic daily diary of the events of each day, as if one were present in person in Paris in March-May 1871, in the midst of the Commune.
