Alessandro Mallamaci

A beautiful place

winner of the’Intarget Photolux Award: Raccontare l’Italia

Location: Palazzo Guinigi, Via Guinigi, 29

Opening days and hours:
Monday – Thursday from 15:00 to 19:00
Friday – Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00

To get to the heart of his story, Alessandro Mallamaci gives us two points of reference. The first is geographic: “The valley of the Sant’Agata river nestles in the red land of the Aspromonte mountains in the province of Reggio Calabria and flows towards the sea until it plunges into the Strait of Messina. The name of the waterway originates from the Greek aghatè, which is linked to concepts such as beauty, goodness and nobility; as if travellers from the Magna Graecia period had been enchanted by this place.” The second is sentimental, a kind of afterword to clarify the title of his work: “This is my landscape. I cannot help but love it. It is a beautiful place.” An unasked-for explanation which highlights, from the very first image, his deep bond, but also a conscious and painful one, for a beloved landscape. Now the journey can begin. We are in Calabria, in the places where Mallamaci lives. Places that compare sublime landscapes and building speculation, uncontaminated nature and nature corrupted by man and his stories, historical finds and industrial waste, popular traditions full of charm and the government of the ‘Ndrangheta. Contradictions, as he himself underlines, are the leitmotif of this area of Italy and between these alternations, for five years, Mallamaci moves and works. He seeks for his photography an equal distance that allows details and broader visions, people and things, to dialogue, that builds an itinerary that develops vertically in which horizontal visions are inserted – almost like a pause. They are places where popular traditions coexist, the joy of being together, the way of raising livestock that is not affected by the passage of time and the remains of abandonment, the traces rusted by time, the undergrowth that invades the concrete, the walls that crumble and the walls that resist. He does not seek denunciation and does not seek an objective gaze. He selects his shots with an intent that does not judge but seeks empathy, perhaps even an exercise in pietas that transforms the persistence of discomfort into a sort of work of land art. He builds a sequence of images of details and expanded visions that page after page leads us to a country that we do not know, that is only his, and he quotes Umberto Zanotti Bianco: “There is no beauty of a territory not yet awakened, there is no wealth of new worlds just touched by civilization, that is worth the charm of this ignored and yet old Calabria, …”. He has his maestri. Those re-interpreters of the “everyday banal” who, since the 1980s, have given a different direction to Italian photography, who have taught us to see a transformed territory, to live with landscapes which have suffocated and forgotten the marvels of the Grand Tour. With the same identical respect and perhaps that same identical love, Mallamaci looks at the places he passes through every day and which every day force him to withhold judgement that would otherwise be inevitable. He thinks about Guido Guidi, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Luigi Ghirri, he compares himself with his friend Filippo Romano and makes his own the lessons of those who have tried and try through photography to recompose the hardships that history has caused on the environment. To this “beautiful place” Mallamaci dedicates an enduring love song, aware that in the images of his Calabria everyone will see what experience has taught them to see, but what they will also see is a remarkable poetic dedication to a suffering land.

BIOGRAPHY
His interest in the visual arts, communication and photography, began in 1996. Until 2008, he worked as an ambassador and educator, collaborating with esteemed brands like EIZO, Leica and Fujifilm. More recently, he had the privilege of lecturing at Columbia College in Chicago, USA. His artistic projects and books he has designed have received awards and graced exhibitions, art fairs and galleries across China, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the UK and the USA, fostering valuable international collaborations. He has successfully managed a cultural centre, a photography school, a far reaching educational project encompassing dozens of classes and teachers across Italy. He has orchestrated festivals, workshops, and thought-provoking talks. He has curated various exhibitions and led a communication agency, a photo agency, and a fine art printing lab. Member of Tau Visual, Associazione Nazionale Fotografi Professionisti, he is represented by Galleria Valeria Bella in Milan. His photographs have been published in various magazines and books.