Collateral Histories by Giulia Parlato and Giovanna Petrocchi at Galleria Eugenia Delfini

Galleria Eugenia Delfini is pleased to present Collateral Histories, a bipersonal exhibition by artists Giulia Parlato and Giovanna Petrocchi.

Overview

The exhibition features, as part of a single installation, some digital collages by Petrocchi from the Magic Lanterns series (2020-ongoing), some analogue photographs by Parlato from the Diachronicles series (2019-2022) and an unpublished corpus of black and white photomontages and 3D objects belonging to the Collateral Histories series realized in collaboration between the two artists in 2020 starting from a commission from Art Licks Magazine.

The selected works question the relationship between photography, historical narration and museology through the exploration of documentary photography but also of photographic collage and some 3D printed objects.

Specifically, in the Collateral Histories series, Parlato and Petrocchi inquiry how cultural forms are stratified in the common imagination and ways in which our cultural heritage is passed down. To do this, the artists approached the past in a dynamic way, that means thinking of it as if it was a container from which to draw archive documents, imagine new scenarios and reflect on the relevance that archaeology, photography and museums have in the creation of historical narration. They asked themselves: What responsibility do museum policies and documentary photography have in making up historical truths, cultural narratives and common imaginaries? Is it possible to reimagine the past? Is there a single story or multiple stories?

If, on the one hand, Parlato’s work questions the idea of photography as a truthful document and borrows the aesthetics of crime scene images and archaeological discoveries to highlight moments of artifacts’ life, on the other, Petrocchi's work draws on museum archives and catalogs and, starting from them, creates digital collages that probe institutional narratives.

Thus, the exhibition presents itself as a set of uncategorized photographs, documents and objects whose temporal or geographical provenance is unknown. As a collection of discoveries or evidence, these works underline how the narratives of the past can and must be cyclically questioned, and, at the same time, reveal the power of fiction and falsification of photography.