If you love straight photography, b&w shots and Shakespeare’s plays don’t miss Matteo Ceschi’s All the World’s a Stage (curated by Loretta Valtz Mannucci and Federico Ramponi), one night exhibition at Teatro LabArca in Milano (September 13, 18 PM) for EXPOinCITTÀ. For more info contact Teatro LabArca or AREA 35 Art Factory.
This one night show will inaugurate EXPOinbArca, a series of theatre performances in the EXPOinCITTÀ cultural events circuit. Matteo Ceschi’s nine shots, taken in Italy, London and Paris, are linked to Anna Bonel’s shows, which will star theatre celebrities like Enrico Bonavera, by the Shakespearian title of the exhibition, All the World’s a Stage. Loretta Valtz Mannucci, professor of English Literature and United States History and long time collaborator of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, chose for each of Ceschi’s shot a verse from famous Shakespeare plays. Federico Ramponi, creative designer, shares the mounting work with her. Eliconturbo Folk Ensemble, a young Milanese folk-jazz-roots group, will play the perfect soundtrack for the night.
All the world’s a stage/And all men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts (William Shakespeare, As You Like It: Act 2, Scene 7)
Matteo Ceschi’s brief show proposes a theater in the mind of each and every, all, who view it. It proposes stories in the fleeting moment. Anchored, yet free. Evanescent. Open to Reason, to intuition in play with rationality. Its antecedents are many, from ‘high’ culture and ‘low’. At its back are long centuries of Tableaux vivants, of 13th century peasant huts and 18th century dining rooms replete with damask tablecloths, crystal, porcelain and silver, laid out to the life in museums, on stages, in 1930s film and Downtown Abbey TV; or M.me Tussaud’s waxworks scenes; to the painstaking ‘rooms in a box’ children once labored over in school. Theater in the mind. And the great, centuries long, play of the Tarot cards: dealt, perused, interpreted, reshuffled, by Prime Minister, tycoon and worker. Each figure a world of individual stories. Evanescent. Real. And unreal. Life. (Loretta Valtz Mannucci)
The mise en scène of Matteo Ceschi’s nine “stories without (an) end” is as volatile, transparent and fragile as his approach to photography. A fluid and intimate space gives each image the time to spark the visitor’s fantasy and take him/her to one of the possible cores and endings of the story it tells. Yesterday was the time it was shot. Today, tomorrow and the day after will be the time of the infinite personal narratives of the observers. In the interval, there is the passage from the physical scene/photo to the immaterial yet lasting dimension of imagination. (Federico Ramponi)
MATTEO CESCHI (1974) è milanese. Come giornalista musicale, ha scritto negli anni per le principali riviste del campo ed è tra i fondatori di una testata on-line dedicato alla indie music. Ha cominciato con le foto dei solisti e delle band, ma anche dei buskers colti mentre suonavano per strada, scoprendosi interessato allo studio di carattere, alle espressioni del viso e alle posture più che all’immagine oleografica del chitarrista rock in posa. Il passaggio alla sua versione della street photography è venuto spontaneamente anche se un po’ per volta.
SO CLOSE/COSÌ VICINO
a cura di Federico Ramponi
24/9 – 2/10 2014
AREA 35, via Vigevano 35, Milano
SO CLOSE/COSÌ VICINO anche su, http://www.mymi.it/info/5602/so-close-cosa-vicino
MATTEO CESCHI, SO CLOSE /COSÌ VICINO
a cura di Federico Ramponi
24/9 – 2/10 2014
AREA 35, via Vigevano 35, Milano
“There are people so dear…”, in questa semplice ed efficace strofa inedita di Jimi Hendrix è racchiusa la mia filosofia. Quando sono dietro l’obiettivo – a essere sinceri, al momento dello scatto mi ritrovo sempre al di là – mi dimentico spesso di cosa stringo tra le mani calamitato inesorabilmente verso l’altro, il possibile soggetto della mia foto. Una curiosità umana, azzarderei pasoliniana, mi dà il coraggio sufficiente di osare e di applicare quella leggera pressione sul pulsante dello scatto. D’altronde, cosa c’è di più naturale che raffigurare un proprio simile nella speranza di ritrovare nell’altro espressioni a noi così connaturate da risultare scontate?
“There are people so dear…” – This simple, forceful, verse from Jimi Hendrix’s May I Whisper in Your Ear says it all for me. When I’m behind the lens – to tell the truth, at the click itself, I’m always way out beyond – I often forget what I’m holding in my hands, drawn to the magnet Other, the possible subject of my photo. Human (even “Pasolinian”) curiosity, makes me brave enough to dare; to apply that light pressure to the button. Still, what is more natural than portraying your fellows in the hope of finding in another an expression so “yours” as to feel a fleeting “Yes, of course!”.
Graphics: Tommaso Ceschi & Francesca Delvigo
TELLING WITH MY EYES 