"Mario Cresci. Un esorcismo del tempo – An exorcism of time" is a fascinating story around the works that the author created in Basilicata between the 1960s and 1980s: a visual research where investigations into territory, social identity and material culture intertwine in an original and profound meditation on time, published on the occasion of the major 2023 exhibition of the same name produced by the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century,Rome.
The book is a tribute, as Marco Scotini, curator of the project with Simona Antonacci, writes "to the great photography of Mario Cresci (heretical, contaminated, outside of himself) and to the uninterrupted challenge of its author against the very principle that founds the specific photographic: that of 'fixing the image of an event in time' as a unique and unrepeatable act. That is to say, as an instantaneous cut into the visible world, given once and for all."
The stay in the Italian South becomes the journey of a sedentary nomad, who immerses himself in a dimension far from that of origin, living in close contact with the community and the territory. The experimentation on the photographic medium continues through the reflection on the ambiguity of the perceptive experience, the investigation on the semantic value of the image and its relationship with time, memory, the archive, with which it builds an articulated and cultured critical discourse around visual language.
The extraordinary black and white series dedicated to domestic interiors, family groups, everyday objects, and "photographs of photographs" are like true archives of memory. In each photo the idea of ​​memory does not only concern the content but directly affects the technique in which there is no chronological accumulation or linear passage but only repetition: this is how the profile of Mario Cresci is outlined, an author who created a work that today proves to be very timely, focused on listening and understanding others.