A photographic series that at first glance seems documentary turns out to be evocative of feelings, memories and reflections.
The exhibition - which features eleven photographic works, four of which are unpublished, taken from 2015 to 2021 with different shooting modes (analog and digital) - is a private reflection on trees, living and dynamic organisms that need to be known and respected: "I like to observe them, to contemplate them. I am fascinated by the shapes and colors visible on their barks: sometimes they make me think of ancient maps of mysterious and fantastic territories. The stillness of trees is only apparent, as is that of the barks. The tree represents life in constant evolution, and on their survival depends our own lives," says Alessandro Vicario.
The series Tree Maps - real fantastical "territories" and utopian "cities" inhabited by different forms of animal and plant life, most of them very small in size but equally important for the balance of biodiversity and the ecosystem itself - began in the summer of 2015 when Vicario photographed the bark of the centuries-old plane tree that stands in the Guastalla garden in Milan and that, as the artist himself recalls, "once stood inside the small garden of the elementary school I attended on Via Francesco Sforza, the first school with a Steiner pedagogical orientation in Italy. Under the reassuring and protective shade of that plane tree I used to play together with my classmates. That tree saw us grow."
The decision to keep on all the images, even the digital ones, the black border of the slide of the first shot - a distinctive sign of the analog photogram taken in 2015 with the old Hasselblad 500 CM lent to him by his father to immortalize the plane tree in the Guastalla garden - was taken by Alessandro Vicario to respect the aesthetic coherence of the series and project it at the same time into an alienating dimension due to the continuous repetition of the same identifying numbers of the frames (7 and 8) of that first shot at Guastalla.
The photographs exhibited by Lab 1930 are the result of a trip along the Italian peninsula and to Kenya, where in January 2017 Alessandro Vicario was part of the first Italian mission that went to learn about the activities that Action for Children in Conflict (AfCiC), a Kenyan nongovernmental organization, has been carrying out since 2004 in Thika, 45 km northeast of Nairobi.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the Kenyan shots will go to support the projects in which AfCiC is currently engaged.
In addition to the eleven Maps a reproduction of Untitled. Milan, Parco delle Cave, a photographic work with subsequent manual color retouching made in 1978 by his father Ennio, a well-known photographer who recently passed away to whom Alessandro dedicates this exhibition.
