Memories of sound

Andrea Guastavino's Solo Exhibition

26/06/2018 - 28/07/2018

Memories of Sound is a project by the Italian artist Andrea Guastavino, arising from the fortuitous discovery of early XX century plates containing negatives on glass. A fragile treasure of unpublished photographs, a dismembered archive of memories, where the images are silent witnesses to past stories. A journey in search not just of a lost time, but of a rediscovered memory, these are images that whisper testimonies of lights and shadows.

What better destination for the negatives, orphans of sights, abandoned to oblivion, than to happen into the hands of the contemporary artist Andrea Guastavino, who still loves to prepare acid baths and navigate in the darkness of a timeless reality, finding a new Imaginative Form.

Among the images on display, there is a collection of photographs of strange military machines: the Acoustics and Instruments of Detection, apparatuses that seem to belong to the circus world, to another era, and that instead were the most sophisticated military machines for the counterintelligence and counter air. As whisper hunters, they listen to the invisible, in search of the visible, investigating the expansion of the distance between sound and light, between what we see and what we hear, in a suspended time that captures memories.

Many of the plates found, left in the boxes for almost a century, have been oxidized in random and unexpected overlayers, changing and recreating themselves through the art of time.

Guastavino prints the ancient plates in an artisanal way into the darkroom, experimenting different materials as a novel alchemist. He plays with the oxidations and wax baths, creating an image that carries its memory load, strascending the photographic two-dimensionality.