Emotional Geographies

Catalog of the exhibition at Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, curated by Matteo Balduzzi, MUFOCO Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milano-Cinisello Balsamo, with the support of Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea, and Ministero della Cultura

Emotional Geographies brings together for the first time four works by Italian artist Tomaso Clavarino developed between 2020 and 2024: Padanistan, Ballad of Woods and Wounds, Like Ivy We Grow Where There Is Place For Us and Soffice come l'erba ruvido come l'asfalto.
Despite their individuality and specificity, the four projects of Emotional Geographies weave a dialogue that shares a common vibrancy of photographic language and a resonance of themes and atmospheres.
These works focus and are set in the vast and somewhat elusive territories of the Po Valley and Northern Italy. This territory - the most populated and economically developed in the country - is nevertheless full of contradictions, especially in its most peripheral and marginal areas.
This area encounters and succeeds in expressing those key themes that characterise Clavarino's artistic research and are found as common denominators in all his projects.
Province and periphery, margins and marginality, adolescence as a transitory and vague existential condition, which cannot imagine the future except with profound uncertainty.