Il mondo che non vedo. Fotografie di Fabiano Parisi

The exhibition “Il Mondo che non vedo” (The World I Do Not See), promoted by the Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e della Comunicazione - sovraintendenza ai beni culturali and by the Associazione Culturale Officine Fotografiche will open in Rome at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 6 pm, and will remain open to the public from the 9 to the 26 of September.

The exhibition, which deals with the issue of industrial archeology, of the abandoned and degraded sites of
our metropolis, wants to be a dialogue and comparison between the architecture of Rome and those of other
Italian and European cities. The project “Il Mondo che non vedo”, through the artwork of Fabiano Parisi
(Rome, 1977), focuses on a story told by the images of these realities, focusing on the aesthetics of these
architectural structures deprived of human presence, among pure geometries and perspectives which glorify
the depth and the overlapping of architectural layers.
The exhibition, curated by Chiara Canali, joins twenty artworks according to two stylistic types: on one side,
abandoned factories, emblem of an outdated ideology of production and work (photos applied on metal with
mixed media and resin), on the other, the sites of social gathering and aggregation now abandoned, such as
aristocratic houses, ballrooms, churches, crypts, theaters, schools (photos applied on wood with mixed media and resin, framed).

In Parisi’s photographic work, social and economical lives coexist, witnessing the decline of certain rituals,
habits, traditions of an era, that of the twentieth century. Family-run factories, noble villas, district cinemas,
provincial theaters, historic churches are slowly fading away, post-war Italy is inevitably changing and being
replaced by the so called non-lieu, as acclaimed by Marc Augè.

Parisi’s photography retrieves information from the past and hands down an image of a demolished construction, a building now shattered, or another that is losing its original features because of the aggressions
of the atmospheric degeneration, conscious of the sadness, the solitude, the grinding which the title of the
exhibition (the world i do not see, borrowed from a collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa) refers to.

Parisi’s point of view is the one of a twentieth century nostalgic who wants to regain the identity of those
anthropological places which are now empty, lost, deprived of the people who once lived them, whose lives
are hidden in the heaps of neglected rubble, the piles of debris, the stratifications of mould and dust deposits.
The detection of this decay is entrusted to the visual images that preserve their historical value, while the
stones and metals of the depicted architecture change irreparably their skin and semantic meaning.

During the exhibition, Friday September 24 at 6 pm, a conference will be held by prof. Prof. Arch. Antonino
Saggio from the Facoltà di Architettura L. Quaroni, Università di Roma La Sapienza, entitled Le aree dimesse della industria. Una grande crisi e una grande opportunità per il mondo contemporaneo. Il punto di
vista della ricerca architettonica (The desolated areas of industry. A great crisis and a great opportunity for
the contemporary world. the point of view of architectural research), that aims to comprehend and meditate
on how the great topic of abandoned buildings and industrial areas is linked primarily to a change in the
general idea of city. Purpose of the conference is to cover this topic in which the research of a new aesthetic
engages in a necessary urban transformation that discloses new ideas and possibilities from an architectural
point of view.