Luigi Fassi - Alternate Takes
The new photographs by Cristiano Berti are the result of a radical reflection on the role of memory and its relationship with the urban environment. The subject of these shots is an area of the Pellerina Park in Turin, along Corso Regina, an avenue that during the 1990s became the workplace of a very large group of African prostitutes, mainly from Nigeria. Throughout that decade, there was a sort of professional and anthropological appropriation of the territory on their part, and in the evenings and at night, the areas of the park that they worked in came to be classified in three distinct zones according to the girls’ physical attractions. The third category, the most economical, was known ironically as Iye Omoge, a Nigerian term used to indicate women who tried, unsuccessfully, to show off a youthful sensuous charm. None of this complex social and economic phenomenon, which led to a substantial part of the city being reorganised and renamed according to semantic and linguistic codes belonging to an African culture, remains today. The park has been “reclaimed”, the prostitutes moved elsewhere some time ago, and motorists and pedestrians travel along that stretch of road indifferent to its curious past. Even the term Iye Omoge has become a linguistic fossil, leaving no trace in the daily lives of the people who now frequent the park, and without any concrete link with the territory. This is exactly why Berti chose Iye Omoge, adopting it as a privileged symbol, like a sort of refined conceptual bait with which to reflect on the ideas of cultural stratification, memory and temporality. How does memory work? What traces do events leave in the places we inhabit? But also, what relationship is established between ourselves and the space around us? These are the questions asked by the apparently inert, indifferent photographs in the exhibition. They open the way for an unusual and surprising form of urban case history, in other words, the possibility of re-accessing memories of past events in a place where culturally sophisticated operations have taken place. Berti’s exercise can be defined as extreme because he focuses on a radical dichotomy between the memory of a place and the total absence of any indications that can help us to reach it from the present. The pictures offer no clues, but they are pure reassurance, a phenomenon that is founded entirely on urban daily life. So for Berti, memory proves to be a prevalently intellectual activity, free from any percept or material residue. Paradoxically, the memory pursued by the artist is one without recall, far from the fertile fixity of the single revealing image that was so dear to Proust and the culture of the 19th century. Berti’s artistic production, which is built around a strong philosophical and speculative matrix, seems to be illuminated by Henri Bergson’s comments on the radically intuitive nature of memory. For Bergson, the static, individually defined image of a memory is worthless because it is the product of rational analysis which cannot grasp the full, fluid reality of memory. This generates the idea of the mobility of duration as the only revealing source of real interior and exterior temporal dynamics. “The interior duration is the continuing life of a memory, that prolongs the past into the present,” commented Bergson, and this is equally true for Berti, whose photographs allow the peculiar past of a territory to “last” in the present, thanks to the effort made by the artist to remember things. Even meticulously engraved maps, which trace the rivers and paths through the park, are the obvious fruit of an effort that is both cognitive and emotional, striving to find a possible suture to connect past and present.
There is a fourth photograph in the exhibition, Alternate Take, which is an unusual shot of Turin, taken by raising the visual perspective from Corso Regina again, where it runs along the Pellerina Park. It is almost a poetic reverberation, the last sign of an oblique, disorienting search, which hints and does not say, does not give a definitive answer, but reveals the infinite perspective possibilities of a glance and of memory. The artist seems to slide from a cold, anthropological interest to an existential plane, in which the dimension of remembrance becomes an emotional sensor of all the more poetically significant aspects of our life. It is the threshold that marks out the distance between an enquiry and a narrative, between an analysis and an emotion. And it is not difficult to understand what Cristiano Berti prefers.
© Luigi Fassi, 2006
from: Cristiano Berti – Alternate Takes, exhibition leaflet, Carbone.to, Turin, 2006
