We live in a cacophonic and sidereal flattening of criteria, meaning and values, under what Olga Gambari, director of the Nesxt diffused festival, defines “the domain of hyper / ultra / mega / fantasy-communication”, where “Everyone has the right to speak as well as anything to be communicated”. In this constant and hasty rush towards the abyss of incomprehension, both between individuals and individuals towards reality and even more towards every form of art, it is essential to find references, which, if not in the words of those who use them by providing subjective points of view (increasingly difficult to be understood and shared) or by putting themselves into play as “Demiurge” of a cultured and eclectic thought, can be identified in strong, sensational ideas, capable of inducing deep sensations and immediately legible as authentic.
Photography, with its scope of truthfulness and precision, of the possibility of immersing in an original point of view as perceived as “repeatable”, with its avoidance of the mysterious, convoluted and redundant formulas of much contemporary art, remains an anchor, a language that necessarily avoids subordinate phrases, refinements for their own sake, redundant circumlocutions and so on. The photograph speaks with a clear voice, able to often overcome the (in) useful cacophony of the obscurity and obscurity which the masters of non-transparency and banality spread everywhere are forcing us.
Niligiri Mountains 2017 © Christian Tasso
In this sense the exhibition Nobody excluded by the Macerata photographer Christian Tasso, open until May 28 in the Hall of Columns located in the Steam Factory in Milan, should be a must for everyone, starting with students of all levels. The language of these images, taken in different parts of the world (Italy, Ecuador, Romania, Nepal, Germany, Albania, Cuba, Mongolia, India, Ireland, Switzerland, Kenya, Cambodia, Paraguay and Ethiopia) possesses a strength that knows how to unhinge the prejudices, a poetics that knows how to reach the intimate, a discursiveness without pretense and without misunderstandings.
These photos are a form of literature, as well as culture and news. And not, or at least not only, because they represent “diversity” as an integrated resource in the social context in which the subjects live. Above all because they communicate, they are a place of encounter and conflict at the same time. Of relationship with who is represented and with the eye which is a means of representation. Because they erase all forms of prejudice from those who look at them, they never make disinformation. Because they possess the clear and truthful discursiveness of the “other”.
Manzanillo Cuba 2016 © Christian Tasso
«In general, disability is treated following two paths», says Tasso, who boasts international awards in his curriculum, «one pietistic, the other, on the contrary, celebratory, which describes the disabled as heroes. I tried to keep away from these interpretations by asking the protagonists to choose how to be portrayed. An attitude that helped me change my way of seeing: instead of their disability, they all put the ordinariness of their life at the center. Work, friends, family. “
All large or medium format, the photos of Nobody excluded (free admission, from Monday to Friday 12-19) are shot in film and developed in the dark room, all in an iconic black and white, which has the strength of the sculpted marble from which emerge, not the extreme situations of the American Diane Arbus, but the sharing of experiences, curiosity towards the human race, inclusion as it should be lived, in the pleasure of everyday life, of work, of being with the family. In the pleasure of a life that is “taking responsibility” against the negativity around.
5. Province of Hôvsgôl Mongolia 2017 © Christian Tasso