On Sunday, October 18, at 4:30 p.m., marking the 50th anniversary of the Friuli earthquake and coinciding with the exhibition Seeing Words: Between Writing and Image, Lab27 hosts a talk with Gabriele Coassin entitled A "Return to Matter: From Social Photojournalism to Experimental Analog Photography as an Antidote to Digital Dependency."

What remains of photography when we strip away the automatic nature of smartphone photography? What does it mean to choose photography at a time when the world around us is undergoing a profound transformation? Gabriele Coassin shares his story in an exclusive talk exploring the evolution of visual language from the 1970s to the dawn of the new millennium. From his teenage beginnings with a folding Kodak camera to receiving praise from Mario De Biasi, Coassin’s journey spans some of the most intense periods in Italy’s recent history: student protests, social reportage among the residents of Rome’s shantytowns and nomadic communities, and his powerful documentation of the devastating 1976 Friuli earthquake.
Coassin’s life has been spent behind the lens. At Lab27, he proposes a journey without projectors or PowerPoint presentations, relying instead on physical prints, first-hand accounts, and the actual equipment used at the time. Coassin will explain how slow, hands-on processes, stereoscopy, and biocompatible photographic techniques are not expressions of nostalgia, but powerful tools for digital detox. It is an invitation to rediscover the pleasure of creating a unique work with one’s own hands, restoring photography to its deepest social purpose: a world of beauty created for oneself and offered to the gaze of others.

Bio
Director, freelance journalist, and university lecturer, Gabriele Coassin has spent fifty years exploring the world of visual communication. A graduate of IUAV University of Venice, he has taught Audiovisual Design and Mass Media Theory at some of Italy’s historic universities, including those in Venice, Udine, and Pisa, and published professional books with Feltrinelli and Apogeo. Driven by the longstanding utopian vision of a form of social photography capable of documenting material cultures, he has developed a unique talent for making the most of even the most accessible production tools. Today, at his Plurimedia Edu Lab, he preserves a remarkable collection of historical equipment, all still in working order. An indefatigable experimenter, he takes his alternative photography workshops across Europe, from Barcelona to Stockholm.