Thursday April 7th, from 6:00pm, Société Interludio is delighted to present L’ora innocente (The innocent hour). 

With the aim of exploring the various directions of media and the photographic gaze, the artists Giovanna Repetto (Padua, 1990), Agathe Rosa (Annecy, 1987) and Marco Schiavone (Turin, 1990) were invited to create a dialogue in the rooms of Piazza Vittorio. 

L’ora innocente, as the critic Vincenzo Estremo writes in his text for the exhibition, was developed around the concept of freeing the mechanical image. An guiltless hour, indeed, when the technique-performance relation gives way to the complete freedom of the image so that it could finally be whatever it wants. 

All of the above is strikingly evident in Agathe Rosa’s works, where all the minimal elements constituting the image clash with a force as inevitable as the one animating the subjectivity of processes. Harmony and presence are replaced by chaos, absence and vacuity. A whole array of uncertainties, that the artist follows and accommodates, ending up in a space in which what is conceivable defines the image and not the opposite. 

The same ‘space in which the possible takes place’ is the one between mirrors and reality, a gauge corresponding to the consistency of glass which divides the reflecting element from what in the world can be reflected. In that space lies a lurking plight, something that remains in attendance. The act proper of Giovanna Repetto’s agency is that of obscuring not mirrors but the outer surface of that space. Repetto deprives her apparats of some fundamental parts – everything making a mirror a tool of sight – creating in turn an innocent hour, a moment in which the image is born and remains secret. 

For Marco Schiavone, instead, the complete fulfillment of the hunger for illusion through the photographic medium puts the public in front of the relational dilemma between the image and its referent. Paradoxically, Schiavone’s image –  which in his practice builds, reproduces and splits up an objective apparatus – ends up evoking the physical outline of the represented subject leaving an “area” actually produced by our own mind: it is the missing object what defines the spatial perception of the space, making the representation useless in its function of copy.