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On its tenth anniversary, Spazio Punch is organizing an exhibition dedicated to photography and publishing, two disciplines at the forefront of its interests and research.
The exhibition presents seven publishing projects involving Italian photographers, produced last year despite the uncertain times.
The works selected involve authors with different backgrounds and styles — the historically acclaimed Mario Cresci and Paolo Roversi, the amateur photographer Alberto di Lenardo and the artists Mattia Balsamini, Jacopo Benassi, Francesca Gardini and Giovanna Silva — supported by publishers that touch different areas of publishing, namely the long- standing Rizzoli, the independent publishing houses bruno, Humboldt Books, Mack and Yard Press, the magazine Alla Carta and the online platform Cortona on the Move.
These works narrate the history of Italy in business and industry, in family and daily life.
The exhibition features Paolo Roversi’s project Time, Light, Space (Rizzoli, 2020), a photographic volume that celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Poliform, the historic Italian furniture company.
For the occasion, Roversi has ventured into object portraits to create an overview of the company’s collections and its innovations in the field of furniture design.
Italy’s much-lauded creative ingenuity is the subject of Togliatti. La fabbrica della Fiat (Humboldt Books, 2020), written by Claudio Giunta and with photographs by Giovanna Silva. The book traces Fiat’s journey fifty years ago to construct a model factory. Workers and technicians were sent from Turin to the USSR to establish a car manufacturing plant twice the size of Mirafiori in a town on the Volga River renamed for the Italian politician Togliatti.
The theme of industrial Italy is also in Contingency Plans (2020), a photographic essay by Mattia Balsamini funded by the visual narrative festival Cortona on the Move. The project focuses on factories across Italy that promptly converted or adapted their production capabilities in response to the pandemic crisis. With access to emergency manufacturing, the photographer bore witness to how production lines were repurposed to produce strategic, lifesaving goods. This new edition of the book, redesigned by the artist with Yard Press, draws renewed attention to a milestone in Italian photography.
Spazio Punch will feature a new work by Cresci that echoes the symbolism of Misurazioni to suggest a temporal link between his past inquiry and eventual future developments.
Another link between past and future occurs in An Attic Full of Trains (Mack, 2020). Carlotta di Lenardo has curated the photographic archive left by her grandfather Alberto di Lenardo (1930-2018), an amateur photographer. The collection comprises some 8,000 photographs shot in his spare time over the course of fifty years in Italy and around the world. The publication represents a monumental body of work, evocative of some of the most renowned artists in the history of Italian photography.
Research into the national editorial and photographic scene also extends to the magazine format, including Alla Carta. In 2020, two bi-annual issues were published, both with a distinctive Italian mood (Arlecchino and Pinocchio). The editorial staff commissioned several photographers to create different portraits of reality; among them was Francesca Gardini. On display here are the photographs from her project Facce, in which she portrays in the foreground a group of teenagers, witnesses of a new future.
Finally, for the occasion of the exhibition, Jacopo Benassi presents An/architecture in Venice, a bichromatic photographic exploration of the island of Giudecca – the industrial and manufacturing heart of Venice as well as the area in which Spazio Punch is located. In his shots, Benassi destructured Sacca Fisola, the working-class neighborhood of Giudecca, extracting, almost literally, some portions of the buildings’ walls and then reconstructing them in the exhibition.
The result of this investigation is an unpublished publication that anticipates a volume by Spazio Punch that will be realized in collaboration with the Venetian publisher bruno. The exhibition Penisola. Committenza, eredità, ricerca tra editoria e fotografia (Peninsula. Patronage, legacy, research in publishing and photography) will be accompanied by a publication designed by Metodo Studio as well as by a series of events and meetings with the authors and publishers featured in the exhibition, while also providing a space for younger projects, publications and magazines.
The set-up, conceived and realized by Zaven, is characterized by metal structures and led lamps that draw the geography of the exhibition. Spazio Punch also features a new bookshop in which Zaven reuses and reinterprets the residual materials of the previous installations.
CURATED BY
Augusto Maurandi
Giulia Morucchio
SET-UP
Zaven
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Metodo Studio
20.05 – 01.08.2021
Spazio Punch
Giudecca 800/o, Venezia
Tuesday—Sunday 12—7.30pm
