Carolina Sartori’s Echoes series encapsulates, through its
simple presence and curious ambiguity, almost everything
we could ever say about shades.
“Return to the Sun of Nothing” is a project born on
the legacy of more than one year of confinement, a visual
transposition of the void and its spatial consequences. The infinite reflection of a sound, as well as the repeti-
tion of apparently always the same days, leaves behind an
absolute silence that these places seem to enclose.
The series abandons the statements of ‘decisive mo-
ments’, the analysis of language in and of itself, the concept
of an all-consuming idea, the emotion of the poet, the er-
udite quotation, the search for a new aesthetic creed, the
use of a style.
The duty is to see with clarity leaving any attempt of appropriation.
A focus on the unassuming fragments of contemporary conditions real and represented in our cities
towards the definition of urbanity and its opposite.
The boundaries of the visible are pushed to reveal al-
ternative panorama, questioning our role in the inhabited
world. In this emptiness, through the gaze, we can find our
understanding of space.
A field of grass, a sequence of modernist towers, a cave,
a hole, every picture appears without content, maybe too
wistful if not too gloomy, but what remains is this floating
sense of stillness: space. It is without content, but surely not
without intentions.
Still, what Carolina Sartori wants to say is never about
photography, but rather about the relationship we have
with elements, objects, architecture and (micro) landscapes. It is not so much another comment on the world
we inhabit, but rather the development of a toolbox to deal
with the world as a whole.
The main tools she introduces are distance and familiarity. She uses distance to neutralize the subjective gesture
of framing, leaving to the observer the articulated task of
interpretation: the series is a visual stimulation for our own
experience - we see what we are (W. Blake) and we are what
we see (R. W. Emerson).
The photographer does not document but collects elements, and lists a set of possible members of a family of
things: a picture can refer to another one. This power of association is a direct translation of the
way in which any tool, any element of cultural production
is always rooted, both in the culture of the world and the
world itself. Distance and association make a completely coherent
world where each element refers to the next. Nothing is a
discovery, but a materialization of something already latently there.
Far from seeking a sense of nostalgia, these photographs
are a claim of emptiness as full, filled by the imagination of
a different future: a common shade.
