MonFest 2022 Fotografia - Vittore Fossati
From March 25 to June 12 2022
The castle of Monferrato (piazza Castello)
Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 10AM to 01PM and from 03PM to 07PM
Free entry
Il Tanaro a Masio (The Tanaro river in Masio)
edited by Giovanna Calvenzi
The exhibition presents the refined project to which Vittore Fossati dedicated several years and two notebooks, published in 2012 and in 2018, that gather what the artist himself has described as his “quick visual notes”. Not art pieces but “notes”. With his usual understatement, he writes: “While going to the town where I work, sometimes I take a little detour to arrive at the bank of the Tanaro river where there is a place called Masio. I take a few pictures, quickly, framing and focusing liberally using the viewfinder of my portable camera. What is there to see? Trees, the colours of the sky and in the water and a pattern of branches that is always different. What is there to do? Besides taking a few pictures, mainly get some fresh air. That's all”. In the second notebook, Ritorno a Masio (Going back to Masio) of 2018, he adds a further, clarifying observation: “Many of my pictures are a struggle to actually achieve nothing. There are small branches and leaves that I pursue for days on end. And as always, when I am back in the position from where I wish to take the picture from, I search if there is still anything left of the sketch and idea that had suddenly appeared clearly before and still, it has forever dissolved into something else entirely. After all, how does someone find the same cloud in the sky the next day?”*
*from “Ritorno a Masio” (Going back to Masio) of Matteo Terzaghi in Vittore Fossati. Il Tanaro a Masio. Secondo quaderno, 2018 (The Tanaro river in Masio. Second notebook, 2018)
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Biography
Vittorio Fossati was born in 1954 in Alessandria, where he currently lives. He has been interested in photography since 1977. After meeting Luigi Ghirri, he has participated in many of the collective projects by him promoted. From the 1980s he conducts photographic research reports commissioned by public institutions and authorities.
In 1984, he joined the collective project Viaggio in Italia (Journey through Italy), first an exhibition then a book, that will later become a point of reference for Italian photography. In 2000, he displayed and published the catalogue Belle arti (Fine Art), curated by Anne Goy and Enrico Baschieri. Alongside Maurizio Magri, in 2004, he made the video-documentary Viaggio in Italia. I fotografi vent'anni dopo, (Journey through Italy, the photographers twenty years later) commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Photography. That same year, he published Vittore Fossati. Appunti per una fotografia di paesaggio,(Vittorio Fossati, Notes on landscape photography) edited by Roberta Valtorta. In 2007, Viaggio in un paesaggio terrestre (Journey on an Earthly Landscape) was published, created in collaboration with the writer Giorgio Messori. In 2008, for Linea di Confine, he publishes In riva ai fiumi vicino ai ponti, (At the riverbanks, near the bridges) a photographic essay about a viaduct passing over the Tanaro river. In 2011 a selection of photographs from Belle Arti (Fine Arts) is shown in Modena at the “Quattro” exhibition, with Olivo Barbieri, Guido Guidi and Walter Niedermayr. The first notebook Il Tanaro a Masio (The Tanaro river in Masio) is from 2012, with an introduction by Matteo Terzaghi to which it follows in 2018 the second notebook, still with an extract by Terzaghi. -
Photogallery
