Maria Crocco
SIC TRANSIT

Description

SIC TRANSIT
Maria Crocco

Sic Transit is the catalog of the photographic exhibition by Maria Crocco, curated by Francesca Comisso and Giorgina Bertolino, promoted by a.titolo, Turin and Fondazione Volume !, Rome, with the collaboration of the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Turin.
Sic transit, this is how the time of man passes and passes, of each man and woman, between an “inside” and an “outside”, beyond what he does and what his life becomes over time. The Sic transit project began in 2002 with a series of photographic portraits taken by Maria Crocco inside the Turin prison Le Vallette, it then developed over time to include over fifty images of men and women, partly executed in prison and in it starts out, involving people met or known by chance who live in a state of freedom. In both cases the shots were taken in a closed space with no environmental connotations, to create a sequence of faces in which it is not possible to distinguish “who is inside from who is outside”.
The artist has chosen to operate within the codes and conventions of photographic portraiture, of which he assumes the traditional three-quarter cut emphasized by the use of black and white, while subtracting from it the possibility of functioning as a tool for identification and of social control. The photographic lens thus comes to define the frame of a “liberated” space, although not neutral, in which gestures, expressions, gazes, shadows, constitute the syntax of a layered language, from which the relational dimension of subjectivity.
The public has the task of exploring this geography of signs crystallized in the pose, and from them look for clues to reconstruct the stories of the subjects portrayed, in an attempt, triggered by the very nature of the project, to guess their identities. Who inside and who outside? A game that can only start and end in the recognition and negotiation of the stereotypes with which each declines the process of identifying the other from himself.