Industrial spaces in the comparative photographs of Gabriele Basilico and Luca Santiago Mora

From Sept. 30 to Nov. 30, 2021, the industrial spaces of the Laterlite factory in Rubbiano di Solignano (Parma) will host the exhibition Luce naturale (Natural Light), curated by Daniele De Luigi and organized as part of the Imprese Aperte program, a project promoted by UPI - Unione Parmense degli Industriali and the association Parma, io ci sto! (Parma, I’m in it!), in collaboration with the Cisita training institution, on the occasion of Parma 2020+2021.

Photographs taken inside the same plant by Gabriele Basilico in 1983 and by Luca Santiago Mora between 2017 and 2020 will be on display. In Gabriele Basilico’s color photographs, “it is as if the factory is telling its own story, with a photographer who tends to hide his skill by passing himself off as a reporter,” writes curator Daniele De Luigi. A historical landscape is also represented in those shots, from the 1970s, in which the factory had become a symbol of the workers’ struggle, to the 1980s in which the sphere of work and that of the private sphere separated and industrial places returned to representing only themselves.

Almost forty years later, Luca Santiago Mora has also photographed the Laterlite factory, but in a very different context, where architecture never appears alone, but seems to exist only in its relationship with the environment, people and time: from being a photographic subject, the factory becomes a living subject for new relationships. “Mora steps back from his privileged position as a photographer and asks what the factory sees around him,” De Luigi writes, “the people, the vehicles, the materials, but above all nature, the trees, the alternation of day and night, the cycle of the seasons.” Santiago Mora’s project is titled Windows and was created as a site-specific installation inside the Laterlite, where formal correspondences can be found between the image and the real space.

At the opening of the exhibition, the result of the Arte Espansa project will be presented, a creative workshop carried out in the Parma 2020+2021 Creative Driven Enterprises program that involved Laterlite workers in the creation of a collective artwork: a participatory design conceived by muschi&licheni with the aim of creating an environmental regeneration intervention for a future nature trail, currently being produced by Laterlite, in collaboration with middle school students from Fornovo, around the Rubbiano plant and along the Ceno River, within the areas of the Taro Regional River Park.

Visits to the exhibition can be booked through the VivaTicket platform on Oct. 7-13-23-27, from 9 to 11 a.m.; or by appointment on other days by writing to laterlite@leca.it

Image: Rubbiano, 1982 © Gabriele Basilico

Industrial spaces in the comparative photographs of Gabriele Basilico and Luca Santiago Mora

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