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Ph by Rafael Portillo

Isolation. Living Apart
Spazio Millepiani, Rome | February 5 – March 5, 2020

Curator A. Muratore

I am one of the 7.8 millions inhabitants of this world. You are one of the 7.8 millions humans populating the Earth. We live and breath side by side, on the same planet, but maybe we are apart. By choice or by destiny, that is difficult to say, almost impossible to explain. Maybe, one day, we will meet somewhere, look in each other eyes and smile. Or say something. Because we are different but still the same. I love imagining you walking on the streets of a city like Tokyo (Japan), Delhi (India), Shanghai (China), Ciudad de México (Mexico). In one of the crowdest cities of the entire world, where one has to queue outside and be squeezed in places. While - you know - I find myself very far away, in a secluded place. In Greenland, perhaps, or - why not? - at Svalbard, where it is not allowed to be born - and neither to die. Who knows if one day you will be able to tell your story... Today, though, it is my turn, and I will tell you mine.

It is hard to believe that, in an overcrowded planet, there is still room for voids. Voids that, in their turn, identify themselves as places with precise positions on the map and peculiar features. They are sparsely populated areas for no other reasons than their climate and geographic positions. They are too high. Too low. Too far. Too cold. Too small. Too uninhabited. Too solitary. Too off-the-grid. In order to live within those regions there must be something like a special connection. One must be born there, or be firmly convinced to move over there. Undertaking a journey like that is possible, even from afar, if we just look at the photos exhibited at the group show “Isolation” (Spazio Millepiani, Rome, February 5 - March 5, 2020). It will be bittersweetly pleasant experiencing this softly melancholic trip, able to take us by the hand and lead us through various cultures, traditions and lands. We will traverse different latitudes and climates. North to south, east to west, hot to cold.

Those pictures are captured in the cold Siberia, in an hot and sandy desert, in the extreme province of America, in Iceland, in some rural area of Tibet, in a semi-nomadic village of Africa. Be ready to witness blue skies and contrasts - black and white, nature and architecture, life and death -, humans and animals, beauty and fascination. Each and every one visual fragment we see before our eyes will let us feel very tiny. Tinier of the tiniest corner of the earth. We will discover something we still don’t know. Art has the power to change our beliefs and points of view. And so does photography. Maybe it’s time to look at the world from another angle. Starting from now. Starting from Isolation.

Text by Silvia Colombo

Works by Chikako Kiyohara; Marusa Racic; Evan Parsons; Rafael Portillo