synopsis
Many European photographers left for the United States with in mind readings, not always accurate but most of the time nostalgic, of Robert Frank's The Americans.
And there are countless subjective or even sentimental road movies, notebooks fascinated by wide open spaces, small towns, motels lost at the end of the world and wooden houses from another century.
Francesco Jodice's approach is the opposite of all that. She does not consider photography as a bearer of memories of an intimate experience but as a tool at the service of an analysis. The latter takes place according to a meticulously established path based on historical data and will allow us to read, over a period of 160 years, the evolution and decline of the greatest world power. This temporal duration is that which separates the beginning of the gold rush in 1848 from the spectacular bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers bank in 2008 which affected the entire American banking system, and beyond the world. Francesco Jodice photographs and highlights one of the forgotten elements of what made the United States powerful: an iconography, or more precisely a mixture of iconographies which associate and combine the natural landscape and Hollywood with the conquest of space, among other things, and found mythologies and power. But today the American landscape speaks of bankruptcy and is strewn with ruins. While we are still in the land of king money. – Christian Caujolle Artistic advisor of the Galerie Le Château d’Eau; preface by Francesco Zanot, interview by Francesco Jodice with Matteo Balduzzi (curator of the exhibition), color photos.
Francesco Jodice's approach is the opposite of all that. She does not consider photography as a bearer of memories of an intimate experience but as a tool at the service of an analysis. The latter takes place according to a meticulously established path based on historical data and will allow us to read, over a period of 160 years, the evolution and decline of the greatest world power. This temporal duration is that which separates the beginning of the gold rush in 1848 from the spectacular bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers bank in 2008 which affected the entire American banking system, and beyond the world. Francesco Jodice photographs and highlights one of the forgotten elements of what made the United States powerful: an iconography, or more precisely a mixture of iconographies which associate and combine the natural landscape and Hollywood with the conquest of space, among other things, and found mythologies and power. But today the American landscape speaks of bankruptcy and is strewn with ruins. While we are still in the land of king money. – Christian Caujolle Artistic advisor of the Galerie Le Château d’Eau; preface by Francesco Zanot, interview by Francesco Jodice with Matteo Balduzzi (curator of the exhibition), color photos.
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technical information
Publisher : Lamaindonne
2023
104 pages
60 photographies en couleurs et n&b
dimensions : 19 x 23.5 cm
languages : french / english
2023
104 pages
60 photographies en couleurs et n&b
dimensions : 19 x 23.5 cm
languages : french / english
about Francesco Jodice
Francesco Jodice (Naples 1967) lives and works in Milan. After graduating in architecture in 1995, he devoted himself to his first artistic research using the media of photography and video. In 1999 he took part in the establishment of the Multiplicity collective. Between 1996 and 2004, the relationship between large urban landscapes and communities was at the center of his research, as evidenced by the projects What We Want, The Secret Traces and The Morocco Affair. Afterwards, Jodice’s attention turned to the different anthropological cultures in relation to the new phenomena of megapolitism. Hikikomori, Ritratti di classe and the Citytellers film trilogy belong to this period. Since 2008, geopolitics has been at the center of the artist’s research. The analysis of the Western system crisis has led to the creation of movies, installations and photographic projects such as Atlante, American Recordings, Rivoluzioni and the more recent West. Jodice considers the practice of art as a civil poetics, his artistic processes promote forms and models of public participation. Examples of this activity can be found in the projects La notte del drive-in. Milano spara, Babel and Scenario. He teaches at the Biennio di Arti Visive e Studi Curatoriali and at the Master in Photography and Visual Design at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano. He participated in group exhibitions such as documenta Kassel, the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, the ICP Triennial in New York, the Liverpool Biennial and the Yinchuan Biennial. Jodice exhibited at the Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli, Turin), the Tate Modern (London) and the Prado (Madrid). His main projects include the photographic atlas What We Want – an observatory on landscape changes as a projection of people desires – the archive of urban tailings The Secret Traces and the trilogy of films on new forms of urbanism: Citytellers. His most recent works – Atlante, American Recordings, Rivoluzioni and West – explore possible future scenarios of the West. His works are part of numerous italian and international public collections.
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Publisher : Lamaindonne
2023 (1st edition)
2023 (1st edition)