Italia O Italia by Federico Clavarino

Italia o Italia is built over the ruins of an unresolved empire, a place in which monuments can be rescaled by the act of looking. The book establishes a continuous duality that makes its way through a labyrinth of contrasts and similarities.

Even if the pictures as a whole propose a narrative, taken individually each one of them  is endowed with unique expressiveness. By means of light and awkward angles the reader is walked through a path the photographer creates out of shadows, obscure symbols, human figures and urban landscapes. A kind of stillness permeates every photograph of this book, transforming what is portrayed in an apparently uninhabited space. Yet all of these fragments are imbued with humanity, that can be found hidden in the invisible piece of a scenery, in the gesture of a hand, in the segment of a column or in the disjointed movement of a person: humanity is present here up to the very last stone.

These flaws in everyday reality, that appear when time is put on hold by the camera, end up revealing the individuality of a place that looks as if it were waiting for a new start, or rather for a different destiny.

About the Artist

Federico Clavarino is a visual artist, researcher, and educator. He studied creative writing at Alessandro Baricco’s Scuola Holden in Turin and documentary photography at Blank Paper Escuela in Madrid. He also holds a Master of Research (MRes) and a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London. To date, he has published eight books, and his work has been exhibited across Europe in official festival programs, galleries, and museums. He was a recipient of the FotoPres La Caixa grant in 2014 and won the Mallorca Contemporary Photography Prize in 2019. Between 2012 and 2017, he taught at Blank Paper Escuela in Madrid, and he currently lectures and conducts workshops internationally, collaborating with museums, schools, and universities.