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DISANTROPICA 6°01’26.0″S 145°59’38.1″E
7 May 2022 @ 18:00 - 5 June 2022 @ 19:00
Gabriele Zago’s works capture the eye with their surprising energy and liveliness while they possess all the qualities to fascinate the viewer and remain fixed in memory. Original and aesthetically perfect images, intriguing and a bit surreal, they are the creativity outcome of an intense and refined artist. Thanks to his great passion for faraway trips, his deep knowledge of photography, an extraordinary awareness towards problems caused by globalization and an enviable skill on graphic-art, he manages to deal with issues of extreme actuality and importance, interpreting them by means of a brilliant semiotic imprint.
Zago’s art-projects start-off as photographic reportage with a clear anthropological perspective and then develop around a key concept, through an elaborate graphic process. Zago prepares each of his photographic explorations with meticulousness and commitment: he thoroughly studies the territory to be visited, he investigates on the local populations and their history, he plans all travel details. His research, more existential than artistic, leads him to carry out exciting, often arduous and sometimes dangerous missions that allow him to meet and document populations, ethnic groups and territories affected by the unstoppable course of “evolution” and “progress” which implies only a slow and inevitable process of extinction. These communities that live in some of the most remote areas of our planet are indigenous populations forced to a painful survival due to climate change, deforestation, intensive farming, socio-political transformations and interests of the big multinational companies.
In order to create his shots, Gabriele Zago gets inspired by the practices of early photography, by the method of exact reproduction of reality applied when photography was a fundamental tool for anthropological studies. However, his goal is not anthropometric photography nor scientific image. He is fully aware that his gaze cannot produce objective documents, since he is a subject belonging to a culture different to the one documented. He decides to shape his story by following his artistic instinct and collecting the signals transmitted by people and nature. He approaches his subjects with extreme respect and humility and portrays them in their natural environment, without invading their intimacy and without creating unnatural attitudes. The artistic processing of the image takes place later, at the conclusion of the journey, with the identification of the title and a complex post-production work that determines the message to be conveyed. Through the language of signs, the sophisticated combinations of colors and materials and the expert use of original graphic expedients, the initial shot is transformed into a statement, which acquires meanings and reveals unknown stories. Gabriele Zago uses all his communication ability and, at the end of this conceptual and graphic process, produces captivating icons, with obvious pop influences, which amaze for their exasperated beauty and at the same time for their strong protest connotation.
In this context DISANTROPICA 6°01’26.0″S 145°59’38.1″E tries to convey the alarm cry of the Papua New Guinea tribes that are inexorably suffering the consequences of globalized progress. Confined and afflicted by problems completely unrelated to their indigenous existence, they risk extinction or vanishing in a rootless folklore attraction. The title of the exhibition indicates the “inhumanity” of the treatment our world reserves to them and the coordinates of the territories where everything takes place!
Afrodite Oikonomidou
