edited by Elisabetta Masala
The project is the winner of Photography Strategy 2022 , promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture
Between what is visibly perceptible and what our senses cannot grasp there exists a liminal space, a web of conflicts and latent potential. A suspended threshold, which is not only physical but also mental, which stimulates the passage towards new levels of knowledge.
The project After the Last Image by Luca Spano explores the biological and technological limits of seeing, investigating the relationship between the visible and the invisible and, in particular, that gray area between the two: the last known point, a border area whose mystery invites discovery.
The photographic and installation works that compose After the Last Image , the winning project of the 2022 Strategy Photography competition, explore the limits of vision and the speculative processes that lead to knowledge of the world. The research residencies carried out during the project, a fundamental part of the conception, allowed us to delve into heterogeneous stimuli from different disciplines. At the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Spano explored that academic trend that has as its object the visible and the practices of the gaze, questioning what an image is and what its role is in contemporary society.
The reflections on the ways in which the visual instrument enters into the study of reality then led the artist to associate photographic practice with geography. A period of residence at the Inter-University Department of Territorial Sciences, Projects and Policies (DIST) of the Polytechnic of Turin allowed him to delve deeper into the figure of the geographer, a scholar who, starting from sight, creates those distortions of space that we commonly call ” maps”.
During his residency at the Deutsches Optisches Museum in Jena, Germany, Luca Spano focused on what it means to see in a process that, starting from optical experience, comes to consider cultural, sociological and anthropological implications.
The series 12 hidden information reconsiders the centrality of the eye in the relationship between human beings and reality, taking up a selection of illustrations on vision problems taken from Theodor Axenfeld’s ophthalmology manual (1912), consulted by the artist in the Deutsches Optisches Museum. In a similar process of decontextualization, eye diseases are treated as pure illustrations that, once abstracted, resolve themselves into changing and fascinating forms. The pupils and irises thus become planets of a constellation of knowledge.
The multiple nuances that make up After the Last Image they push us to broaden our perspectives by stimulating new questions and new visions. The artist encourages us to reflect with greater awareness on the complexity of perceptive phenomena and on the ambiguities that shape our world. It creates a bridge between the known and the unknown and takes us on a journey of crossing the border. That liminal interval full of possibilities, where we always move our limits a little further.
Biography
Luca Spano (1982, IT) is a multidisciplinary artist. He trained between Europe and the United States, with a degree in Communication Sciences at Sapienza University in Rome, an MA in photography at the London College of Communication in London and an MFA in visual arts at Cornell University in Ithaca (US). His work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and festivals such as: Triennale di Milano, MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome), BredaPhoto Festival (NL), Malta Festival (PL), Saavy Contemporary in Berlin (DE), Luis Adelantado Gallery (ES), Paolo Erbetta Gallery (IT), Caelum Gallery in New York, Institute of Italian Culture in Paris, Institute of Italian Culture in Hamburg and the Higher Regional Ethnographic Institute.
Luca has been artist in residence at Fundacion Botin (ES), NoArte Paese Museo (IT), Künstlerischen Tatsache (DE), Kultur einer Digitalstadt (DE) and visiting artist at Arts Letters and Numbers Residency (US) and others. His work has received awards and grants such as the MEAD Fellowship (UK), CCA Grant and Einaudi research grant (US), The John Hartell Award (US), Graziadei Prize (IT), the Premio del Paesaggio Regione Sardegna (IT), New Work Prospect Art Grant (US), Photography Strategy 2022 MiBACT (IT).
He was one of the directors of the OnOff Picture photographic agency based in Rome, co-director of the NYC Creative Salon organization in New York, and creator of OCCHIO, an image research and teaching laboratory based in Cagliari.
His work is included in public and private collections such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Cornell University artist’s book collection, the Graziadei collection and the Sardinian Higher Regional Ethnographic Institute.
Project created in collaboration with
Deutsches Optisches Museum, Jena (DE)
Inter-University Department of Territorial Sciences, Projects and Policies (DIST) of the Polytechnic of Turin, Turin (IT)
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Florence (IT)
Mousse Publishing bilingual catalogue
Critical texts by: Elisabetta Masala, Giangavino Pazzola, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Massimo Canevacci, Luca Spano and Giovanna Corraine, Franziska Perske and Maria Dienerowitz, Ute Dercks, Marco Santangelo
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