Tra il bianco e il nero
27.9 – 24.11.2024

Works of
Pablo Piovano, Lorenzo Zoppolato, Giorgio Negro

Curated by
Steve Bisson

Orari
Sunday 4:30pm–7:30pm

On Friday, September 27 at 9:00 PM, Lab27 opens its new exhibition program in Treviso with the "Tra il bianco e il nero (Between Black and White)."
With the ambition to continue drawing attention to the complexities of social life and the human presence in the world, Lab27 brings together three photographers—Pablo Piovano, Lorenzo Zoppolato, and Giorgio Negro—each of whom has made black and white imagery a defining element of their visual language.
Three photographic projects engage, through a grayscale lens, with the so-called “New World”—the southern regions of the Americas—which still resist, often reluctantly, the dogmas of the old continent. Indigenous resistance, dreamlike poetics, and a mystical fatalism all converge to compel a rewriting of law and history more urgently there than elsewhere.

Pablo Piovano, an Argentine photographer renowned for his documentary work exposing the use of pesticides in the Pampas, takes us into the world of the Mapuche—the People of the Land. Through his lens, he reveals the deep-rooted reasons behind an unyielding struggle: a fight against abuse, humiliation, and dispossession; a fight for the preservation of origins, language, medicine, and worldviews that cannot coexist with the erasure of forests and rivers, with forced assimilation into a suicidal model of progress, with nature reduced to fuel for industry, or with a cosmos stripped of its mysticism and sacredness.
This is a people who have been asserting their dignity for over 500 years—and in doing so, offer the possibility of an alternative to the Western short-sightedness that has usurped their lands and their rights. Before the Americas, before Amerigo Vespucci, forced conversions, ethnic cleansing, dams, and concrete habitats—there was Wallmapu, and another way of being in the world. Ancestral, and far less destructive.

Lorenzo Zoppolato is no stranger to South America, a land from which he has already drawn panoramas that blur the line between reality and fiction—oscillating through the uncertain greys of Patagonian existence while offering the vastness of a dream.
In his "Endless Buenos Aires", the Udine-born photographer sketches a map of weary faces and poetic bodies, each embodying fragments of interrupted stories. The viewer wanders through these suspended moments, tracing the fragile fate of a city inherited from Borges—a city Zoppolato approaches with a quiet fervor, returning it to us in bursts, in timid and bold clicks of the shutter.
An unresolved mystery of life runs through Zoppolato’s photographs, and perhaps that’s why they feel strangely familiar—as if we’ve already seen them somewhere. Somewhere unnamed, buried deep within. In the river of lives that came before us—and those still to come. Lives that arrive quietly, like the light of dawn.

“Pathos” by Giorgio Negro is a sentimental narrative born from a need for compassion—and from the desire to soothe the wounds of 20 years spent in humanitarian operations in war zones. These are photographs grown among people on the streets, speaking to the quiet power of allowing oneself to be surprised—by a gesture, by a flight as delicate as the perception that guides our choices.
It’s a South American repertoire in which the innocent cruelty of a denied dream stands out, where sensuality is betrayed by a shadowy stage. An imagery that feels almost animalistic—zoomorphic—blending with bare life, with the soil of a dark, organic grey, and with open skies swept by brooding clouds that seem less futile than the present moment.
A kind of angelic, wondrous despair that smells unmistakably human—like smoke rising from nothing. And it lingers in your eyes, like the memory of a flame. Of time, burning.

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