Works of
Maciej Pisuk, Ciro Battiloro

Curated by
Steve Bisson

Orari
Sunday 4:30pm–7:30pm

Lab27 opens on September 25 at 7:00 PM with the exhibition “Abitare lo stigma” by Maciej Pisuk and Ciro Battiloro. Two neighborhoods, two stories that invite us to look closely, beyond the veil of indifference and cheap pity, at human life. The social spectrum reveals faces and bodies unmasked, caught in delicate, spontaneous, and familiar gestures. A distance that becomes thin. An aura of empathy. It is us.

Maciej Pisuk (Bielsko-Biała, 1965) – Polish writer, screenwriter, and photographer. He authored the screenplay for Leszek Dawid’s film You Are God, previously published as a book by Wydawnictwo Krytyka Polityczna. He lives in Warsaw. A graduate in screenwriting from the National Film School in Łódź, Pisuk has written the TV comedy Stars and the Fate of Man and a screenplay about Jacek Kuroń. His writings have appeared in brulion and in the anthology You Have Your Own Poets. The series on display, “Under the Skin,” began shortly after Pisuk moved to the Praga district on the right bank of the Vistula River in Warsaw, Poland, with the aim of producing a photographic documentation of the district’s “social landscape.” By approaching its inhabitants and venturing into spaces other photographers dared not explore, Under the Skin offers a sensitive and dramatic portrait of the neighborhood. The project is ongoing.

Ciro Battiloro (Torre del Greco, 1984) – Italian photographer based in Naples. He studied philosophy at the University of Naples “Federico II” and later devoted himself to documentary photography. His work is a comprehensive exploration of the human condition, employing a deeply intimate approach to discuss broader social issues through everyday life.
In recent years, Battiloro has focused on certain neighborhoods in southern Italy (Rione Sanità in Naples, and Santa Lucia, in Cosenza) that have undergone processes of marginalization. Rione Sanità is a place of love and solitude, irony and tragedy, faith and sin, delicacy and tribalism, harmonious melodies and jarring screams. These contrasts create surreal existences.
The tuff quarries, like a placental sac, shelter this union of worlds, isolating it from the rest of the city and preserving the authenticity of human life. This authenticity communicates with others through the language of the body—a powerful voice that tells of deep relationships and essential lives. Rione Sanità embraces you with its disarming simplicity; within this embrace, you find both the unconditional affection of a grandmother and the primal instinct of an animal.