Francesco Jodice “West”
- Exposition
- Exposition
Practical information
- Date et heure
- Location Galerie le Château d'Eau
- Public Tout Public, Tout Public
WEST raconte l’ascension et le déclin du modèle américain et de son image, sur une période comprise entre le début de la ruée vers l’or (1848) et la faillite de Lehman Brothers (2008).
WEST est un projet de recherche qui enquête sur les origines de la crise actuelle du modèle libéral et, plus généralement, de l’Occident dans un arc compris entre le début de la ruée vers l’or (1848) et la faillite de Lehman Brothers (2008). Commencé en 2014, WEST consiste en trois longs voyages à travers certains des États où la ruée vers l’or a eu lieu : Californie, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, Nouveau-Mexique, Nebraska, Texas, avec l’inclusion de zones contiguës mexicaines.
Le point central de l’ensemble de l’œuvre se trouve au carrefour entre la géologie particulière de cette région (l’une des plus anciennes structures géologiques de la planète) et les ruines archéologiques (mines, villes fantômes, utopies, complexes et infrastructures abandonnées) de cette saison animée par une quête irrépressible de richesses immédiates.
Commissariat de Matteo Balduzzi
Réalisé avec le soutien du Ministère de la Culture italien, WEST a été sélectionné parmi les lauréats de la Xème édition de l’Italian Council (2021) un programme de promotion internationale de l’art italien de la Direction générale de la créativité contemporaine du ministère de la Culture.
Le projet est présenté par le Musée de la photographie contemporaine de Milan Cinisello (MUFOCO) avec la Galerie Le Château d’Eau, en collaboration avec le centre d’architecture Arc en rêve de Bordeaux.
A meticulously established path
Many European photographers went to the United States with readings, not always accurate but mostly nostalgic, of Robert Frank’s Americans in mind. There are countless subjective and even sentimental road movies, notebooks fascinated by wide open spaces, small towns, motels lost at the ends of the world, and wooden houses from another century.
Francesco Jodice’s approach is the opposite of this. He does not consider photography as a vector for memories of an intimate experience, but as a tool for analysis. The latter follows a meticulously established path based on historical data and makes it possible to grasp the evolution and decline of the greatest world power over a period of 160 years
This is the time span between the beginning of the gold rush in 1848 and the spectacular collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in 2008, which affected the entire US banking system, and beyond.
Francesco Jodice photographs and highlights one of the forgotten elements that made the United States powerful: an iconography, or more precisely a combination of iconographies that not only associate and combine the natural landscape and Hollywood with the conquest of space, among others, but also found mythologies and power. But today the American landscape is going bankrupt and is littered with ruins, while we are still in the land of big bucks.
Christian Caujolle, Curator
Book
The lamaindonne Editions and the Galerie Le Château d’Eau present
After the West, photographs by Francesco Jodice on the occasion of the exhibition «West».
Textes de Matteo Balduzzi, Francesco Jodice, Francesco Zanot
Size : 19 x 23,5 cm
104 pages /41 b&w and four-color photographs
Paperback cover with flaps
Biography of the artist
Francesco Jodice, born in Naples in 1967, lives in Milan. His artistic research focuses on changes in the contemporary social landscape, with particular attention to the urban anthropology phenomena and the production of new participation processes. His projects seek to establish a common ground between art and geopolitics, offering artistic practice as civil poetics.
He has been teaching for two years at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan in visual arts and curatorial studies, as well as in the master’s degree programme in photography and visual design
He is a founder of the Multiplicity and Zapruder organisations.
He has participated in important group exhibitions such as Documenta, the Venice Biennial, the São Paulo Biennial, the ICP Triennial in New York, the second Yinchuan Biennial, and has exhibited at the Castello di Rivoli, the Tate Modern (London) and the Prado (Madrid).
His major projects include the photographic atlas “What We Want”, an observatory of landscape change as a projection of collective desires, the urban trace archive “The Secret Traces” and the trilogy of films on new forms of urbanism “Citytellers”.
His most recent works – Atlante, American Recordings, WEST and Revolutions – explore possible future scenarios for the West.