Ancona

Ancona is a lenticular photograph showing the corner of a city park in the town of Ancona, Central Italy. Viewers, according to their position, see the park wrecked by a landslide or in perfect order.

About Ancona

When I first saw it, this place was in a deplorable state, everything that should have been vertical had taken some bizarre tilt, and the ground formed humps that had swollen even the paved path, breaking its surface. Ancona was hit by a major earthquake in 1972, and in several parts of its territory, it sits on landslide terrain. This congenital instability seemed to me well summed up by what I was seeing, and I wanted to photograph this city corner.

The little park of Ancona remained that way for years after the photograph was taken, and throughout this period the part of the lenticular image showing the intact landscape represented an entirely virtual order. Then, one day, the area was fixed, and things went back to where they belonged. Since that time, the lenticules showing the park in order, although being the result of a digital manipulation, correspond to the reality of the place; while the lenticules documenting the actual state of the park in 2007 appear as the result of a perverse fantasy.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

In the lenticular image Ancona, two sights of the same place meet: they are a view of an urban public park. It is an identical and different place at the same time, which becomes source of doubt, reflection, being impossible to state which is the real existing sight, being the used means: photography. No sentence can better explain this concept than the Saul Bellow “Nothing is too strange to be true”, chosen by the artist as the exhibition title.

© Cristina Petrelli

excerpt from «Cristiano Berti: Nothing is Too Strange to be True», in Niente è troppo strano per essere vero, exhibition flyer, Macerata: Fuorizona Artecontemporanea, 2007