Forget/Fullness

“Cut through with a slash, the word Forget/Fullness conjures a paradoxical “fullness in forgetfulness”. Eva Frapiccini chooses this disjointed term as the title of her solo exhibition at Peola Simondi Gallery, which interrogates the condition of the image in a visually saturated world, where the volume and type of digital photographs in circulation is inversely proportional to our ability to remember…

While Eva Frapiccini’s archives usually insist on preservation and on the importance of remembering, in Forget/Fullness photography serves towards creating a unique archive of moments to be forgotten.

To define her work protocol for Forget/Fullness, the artist connects the contemporary notion of cognitive offloading and the practice of delegating memories to the cloud with the analog experience described by Italo Calvino in “Avventura di un fotografo” (1). Written in 1970, when an early “viewfinder folly” created the illusion that the camera could record reality completely and in a 1:1 scale, the story follows Antonino Paraggi’s conversion from wary non-photographer to “hunter of the unattainable” and crazed amateur photographer…

To this injunction, Eva Frapiccini opposes a redistribution of visual responsibilities, attributing the relevant event to human memory and what remains out of focus to the machine. Off-center vision implies a focus on the materiality of memory. Though missing in the photographs of Forget/Fullness, the body does feature in the use of the Hasselblad camera, which requires the artist to go through an eminently physical process: the device is held at belly height, the intervals of shooting extraordinarily slow compared to the rapidity to which the smartphone has accustomed us. It is a matter of attempting the unreal operation foretold by Calvino of “giving a body to memory in order to replace it with the present before his eyes.”

[from the exhibition text by Federica Martini]