Jonna Bruinsma, Aurore Dal Mas, Martina della Valle: Crossings
20.5.2021, 9:00 PM
Lab27 is pleased to announce the eleventh edition of INCONTRI DI FOTOGRAFIA, which will take place on May 20 at 9:00 PM, live online on the Lab27 YouTube channel.
Joining us are photographers Jonna Bruinsma (Netherlands), Aurore Dal Mas (Belgium), and Martina Della Valle (Italy). Through their projects, they expand the horizon toward new practices of "crossing boundaries", redefining interpersonal relationships, family spaces, and modes of participation and interaction through photography.
Jonna Bruinsma tells the story of her encounter with the city of Bari and the Dragone family, which sparked an anthropological exploration of young generations and their desires. She will talk about her friendship with Miky Dragone, an eleven-year-old boy who introduced her to his family and friends. This slow and gradual approach allowed photography to merge with everyday life. Jonna had to build trust, overcome language barriers, and gain acceptance from the residents of Strada Tancredi. She partially relinquished control, lending her camera to three young members of the family, who delighted in photographing on her behalf, granting her access to an intimate and private dimension. What united the photographer and these young, impromptu photographers was a shared desire to communicate.
Aurore Dal Mas, with her project "Don’t love me, I’m your toy", explores and challenges the experience of being watched through the network. The Belgian artist reflects on the spectator-voyeur role of the audience, highlighting the dehumanization and vulnerability of relationships, as well as the difficulty of achieving intimacy and mutual gratification. Using a low-fi aesthetic, she creates an atmosphere that simulates a dating chat, inverting traditional gender roles: for once, it is the man who sheds his confidence. The series also conveys the exhaustion of existing merely in the eyes of another as an object of desire, exposing the fragility of bodies as objects of consumption.
Martina Della Valle’s One Flower, One Leaf is a continuously evolving archive of still lifes created during participatory events in different cities, investigating spontaneous flora. Workshop participants are asked to create compositions in the form of still lifes, which the artist then photographs. These explorations focus on marginal urban areas left wild and uncultivated, rich in spontaneously growing plant species. Participants observe these spaces, selecting organic and mineral materials—plants, flowers, branches, stones—to include in their compositions. This apparent compositional randomness, combined with the rhetoric of "objet trouvé", recurs in other works by Martina, such as "The Post-it Book" or "Wabi-Sabi", where the discovery of a book or an archive of negatives initiates a process of recollection and formal and expressive metamorphosis.
Jonna Bruinsma, Aurore Dal Mas, Martina della Valle: Crossings
20.5.2021, 9:00 PM
Lab27 is pleased to announce the eleventh edition of INCONTRI DI FOTOGRAFIA, which will take place on May 20 at 9:00 PM, live online on the Lab27 YouTube channel.
Joining us are photographers Jonna Bruinsma (Netherlands), Aurore Dal Mas (Belgium), and Martina Della Valle (Italy). Through their projects, they expand the horizon toward new practices of "crossing boundaries", redefining interpersonal relationships, family spaces, and modes of participation and interaction through photography.
Jonna Bruinsma tells the story of her encounter with the city of Bari and the Dragone family, which sparked an anthropological exploration of young generations and their desires. She will talk about her friendship with Miky Dragone, an eleven-year-old boy who introduced her to his family and friends. This slow and gradual approach allowed photography to merge with everyday life. Jonna had to build trust, overcome language barriers, and gain acceptance from the residents of Strada Tancredi. She partially relinquished control, lending her camera to three young members of the family, who delighted in photographing on her behalf, granting her access to an intimate and private dimension. What united the photographer and these young, impromptu photographers was a shared desire to communicate.
Aurore Dal Mas, with her project "Don’t love me, I’m your toy", explores and challenges the experience of being watched through the network. The Belgian artist reflects on the spectator-voyeur role of the audience, highlighting the dehumanization and vulnerability of relationships, as well as the difficulty of achieving intimacy and mutual gratification. Using a low-fi aesthetic, she creates an atmosphere that simulates a dating chat, inverting traditional gender roles: for once, it is the man who sheds his confidence. The series also conveys the exhaustion of existing merely in the eyes of another as an object of desire, exposing the fragility of bodies as objects of consumption.
Martina Della Valle’s One Flower, One Leaf is a continuously evolving archive of still lifes created during participatory events in different cities, investigating spontaneous flora. Workshop participants are asked to create compositions in the form of still lifes, which the artist then photographs. These explorations focus on marginal urban areas left wild and uncultivated, rich in spontaneously growing plant species. Participants observe these spaces, selecting organic and mineral materials—plants, flowers, branches, stones—to include in their compositions. This apparent compositional randomness, combined with the rhetoric of "objet trouvé", recurs in other works by Martina, such as "The Post-it Book" or "Wabi-Sabi", where the discovery of a book or an archive of negatives initiates a process of recollection and formal and expressive metamorphosis.
