Exhibition: Nicola Morandini | THE PASSER RIVER PROJECT - Assonances

Opening 15.07.2023, 7 pm

Outcomes of a fluvial synaesthesia, [almost] an introduction – Marco Cillis
The sense of wandering Nicola Morandini conveys in this photographic project is only apparent, with its sudden shifts in rhythm often changing the pace and the sonorous world of each location accompanying every shot.
Instead, it leads one on a sort of secular – yet highly spiritual – pilgrimage of exploration, in which each stop is part of a larger semiological investigation of the valley and is represented by progressive dual focusses that reveal undiscovered relations, whispering unsuspected subtexts. We call them assonances, but they are the mixture between the deeper structure of the Passeier Valley and the result of an anthropic presence at times mimetic, as the fisherman amidst the rocks, at other times distracted, at others rapacious, almost always an accomplice to nature: a sequence of imperfect rhymes that open to the imaginary.
What is it that ties the rusty pieces of iron soaring over the foam of the stream to the furrows that time has dug in the rock? Why does a cloud reflected in the water accompany a pile of gravel in the middle of a meadow? By what logic does a freshly shorn alpaca coexist with a monstrous wooden creature sprung from the river? The rules of the game are simple and can be traced back to the coexistence of similar rhythmic sequences resolved with heterogeneous materials, or to the proxemics of the subjects portrayed, or to the ability to suggest or evoke common archetypes or – as for the abandoned hotel – to tell the relationship between the interior and the external through the same object. Photographs tell stories that have yet to be written, or rather that are written in ever changing characters in the eyes of those who behold them and accept to be accompanied by the echo of the Passer, flowing nearby.
Walking is clearly an aesthetic practice, as is the moment one rests – which coincides with a shot – and the wonderous moment in which the landscape reveals itself to our eyes at the apex of a fluvial synaesthesia: the rhythm of the water leaping weirs in rapid sequence or the vague crystalline roar of a whirlpool or the lively gait among the emerging rocks, when the water takes on an aeriform consistency and seems to set on the observer’s skin, giving him a sense of cool relief.
Between the Timmelsjoch and the city, the narrative force of the stream submits images that lend themselves to limitless interpretative keys; there is even a bathing suit entangled in the foliage of a shrub, but that's another story ...

promises, cross the country and stop for a few minutes at the border of the territory to close inauspicious chapters".
Sylvain Tesson, Sur les chemins noir, 2018
Assonance” n.f. [der. from assonare] - Treccani - 2. By extens., in literary language harmonic correspondances of sounds, colours, forms, etc.

Nicola Morandini (Brescia, Italy, 1970) graduated in forestry sciences. He attended workshops held by various masters of Italian photography, such as Davide Monteleone, Alex Majoli and Guido Guidi. His work has favored social reporting in the first instance. For some time he has turned his attention to the territory, with the intention to capture the extraordinariness of the ordinary.
Since 2016, he has been a member of the cultural association 00A, which was founded in Merano based on an idea by Christian Martinelli as a temporary space for exhibition events related to the appreciation of analogue photography, with the aim of fostering dialogue around contemporary photographic culture.

www.nicolamorandini.it/