As Long There Is Life, There Is Distance
9.4 – 29.5.2022

Works of
Stacy Kranitz, Fabiola Cedillo, Davide Degano

Curated by
Steve Bisson

Orari
Sunday 4:30pm–7:30pm

Lab27 opens the exhibition “Where There Is Life, There Is Distance” on April 9 at 7:00 PM, featuring photographs by Stacy Kranitz, Fabiola Cedillo, and Davide Degano.

Distance is a simplified image of reality, often used to characterize human and social relationships. Photography, as a tool for investigating and representing the visible, offers the possibility of measuring these gaps—made up of spaces and conventions—sometimes reducing the complexity between a phenomenon itself and the idea we form of it.
The exhibition explores the notion of distance from multiple perspectives: familial, generational, and geographical. In each, photography emerges as a means of understanding, of fostering proximity, and of cultivating potential interest in human relationships—a way of thinking more broadly. It is an invitation to listen and engage in dialogue with the other, beyond the limits of communication; almost a form of dreaming, a different kind of connection, a balancing of our emotions to compensate for the challenge described by Manari Ushigua (guide of the Sápara, an Amazonian tribe): “We have lost the art of listening. Now, the first thing we do when something appears is take a photograph.” 
Paraphrasing anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, we ask whether photographic listening can become a practice to open ourselves to the unexpected, setting aside the habitual frameworks through which we normally perceive the world.

The three artists involved explore the practice of photographic listening in distinct directions. In the series From The Study On Post-Pubescent Manhood, photographer Stacy Kranitz focuses on a group of young people, with whom she formed friendships, living in a dystopian complex known as Skatopia, Ohio. Her work seeks visceral manifestations of American youth: violence as catharsis, reckless or antisocial behavior. A cocktail of pleasure, pain, devotion, and vitality often leads Kranitz to blur boundaries, becoming part of the scene, adopting the behaviors and thoughts of her subjects, thereby collapsing the distance between observer and observed. This empathetic practice provides no simple answers about adolescence, which may not exist as a chronological age but rather as a necessary illusion to become adults.

Fabiola Cedillo, with Los Mundos de Tita, follows her older sister, now in her thirties, who lives in a childlike state that requires constant care and attention from her family. “Our communication is based on hugs and deep looks,” writes their father. Cedillo creates an almost dreamlike space for overcoming these challenges. Her photographs intertwine with Tita’s drawings, producing a landscape that partially escapes definition while opening the possibility of experiencing what appears distant or immeasurable. As Cedillo states: “We all live life between reality and fantasy, between dreams and nightmares. We are all fragile and strong, each with our own particular limits.”

Davide Degano’s ethno-photographic project Sclavanie is the result of a five-year journey exploring Italian Slavia and its origins. Mountainous lands of linguistic minorities, long forgotten during the Cold War, on the border with the former Yugoslavia, where boundaries have historically created otherness. In these time-frozen villages, the photographer—raised in Faedis—encounters a community of “survivors.” Through an active, critical, and conscious re-examination of the local, Degano investigates a shared memory that has endured in these places, hovering between past and present. The result is an unprecedented perspective that narrows differences, especially when looking just beyond the border, into Slovenia. After years of “self-exile” in Alpine mines, world wars, the 1976 earthquake, the Soviet blockade, and migrations to the plains during industrial modernity, some have begun retracing the path in reverse. Distances shrink in a global village. (We thank Studio Faganel for their collaboration).