Can we predict future through photography? We can only answer this question with one more accurate question: can we take pictures of the future? Maybe, we can, if the construction of this mosaic happens through a not predictable daily process.

Usually every artistic process requires a programming by the artist himself. The painter sets up his canvas, the sculptor choose his model, the architect draws his project. But there is a territory where everything gives way to the "here and now", a charming and mysterious territory called Improvisation.

What's a Ornette Coleman's jam session, if not a proud construction of future itself? What is the blinding flash of genius of Caravaggio, if not an arrow shot towards the unknown?

By its very own nature of being immersed in improvisation, photography bears witness to reality.

A photo freezes a moment, forever. That moment. But very often, an instant before we freeze it, we still don't know what will happen. For this reason, perhaps, photography is the art that best captures the most profound reality. Because, literally, it lives in its inscrutable process of formation.

You can stare at the same thing every day, but through an ever-changing look every time, you can render it a new, vibrant, pulsating life.

 

From 2006 to 2010 I took a thousands of photos from my roman's apartment terrace, which I collected in a stop-motion film of 4 minutes, projected in loop among 4 prints from film. 4 years crammed into 240 seconds, accompanied by Barbara Eramo's notes and voices, who composed this piece especially for the occasion.

A very long (or very short, depends on the point of view) photographic jam session, where it was impossible to predict what would be the next note to be played.

A choral process where people, things, animals, gestures, natural phenomena, lights and colors chase each other and alternate in an entropy that becomes a metaphor for the unpredictability of life itself.

 

Our life that, like photography, often chases the present without even realizing that we are already deeply immersed in the future.

Text: Simone Corona

Translation: Martina Biccheri

a project by Carina Wachsmann