Francesca Piqueras' wrecks on display at the Ducal Palace in Massa

Held at the Palazzo Ducale in Massa, from Oct. 28 to Nov. 26, is the exhibition Landscape of Humanity, a solo show by the Italian-Peruvian photographer Francesca Piqueras (1969): coming from a family of artists who frequented Duchamp, Man Ray and Dalí, among others, she oriented her interests toward photography, also studying art history and cinema. His research focuses on a few recurring elements: the sea, the sky, metal, and the protagonists of his photographs are remote places, abandoned wrecks, oil platforms, old industrial and military structures.

The Massa exhibition, which displays twenty-five shots and is curated by Mauro Daniele Lucchesi, summarizes Francesca Piqueras’ artistic journey. “I photograph what man has built for economic reasons or war,” declares the photographer, “where often for his architectural needs he invents incredible excuses by building in extreme situations and in a very questionable way. But my purpose is not to denounce, rather I am interested in human folly, its paradoxes and contradictions. I find that the aesthetics of these objects are at their best when nature takes its course. Time, rust, decay reinvent these architectures and poetically sculpt and rewrite human history. Our history. I have been photographing for several years the paradox of a furious industrial world, seascapes from which arrogant structures emerge: oil rigs, shipwrecks, strong warriors, which I choose when they are at decay, dying, eaten by the elements. I find a metamorphosis of powerful and monumental sculptures, endowed with autonomy, their own aesthetics that I transform into post-industrial design sets. I continue to defend this aesthetic realism and these fallen, abandoned, forgotten giants, totems and taboos of human presence, with its excesses and its inability to think about the future of the planet.”

“Francesca Piqueras,” the curator points out, “belongs to a new emergence of photographic artists, linked to the urgency of giving meaning to chaos, even if to magnify it. The abandonment, renunciation, forgetfulness of our human condition in a post-industrial apocalypse, littered with skeletons unrecognizable in their imminent annihilation. An acute vision of a society without anchorage. These torn landscapes, wounded by a malaise that hates more than rust, herald the end. An apotheosis without metaphysics,” he concludes, "a transmutation of matter and light in which the fate of a humanity ignorant of its own destruction is written in painful toil.

The exhibition is open Tuesday through Saturday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Information on the City of Massa website: www.comune.massa.ms.it.

Francesca Piqueras' wrecks on display at the Ducal Palace in Massa

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