The everydayness of lockdown in Silvia Camporesi's photos at Other Size Gallery in Milan

“I have to get to the evening with at least one good photograph; this is my daily task. If I don’t give myself this goal every day, I risk going crazy.” This is how Silvia Camporesi, a photographer, took courage to overcome the hardest moments of lockdown. Photography to resist. From those shots came Domestica, the exhibition curated by Claudio Composti, on view at Other Size Gallery in Milan, from Dec. 16, 2021 to March 4, 2022. It is an intimate tale, a diary in images in which the artist makes the public share her project that took shape within the domestic walls in the difficult days of March-April 2020, when the world was overwhelmed day after day by the pandemic.

Eleven small- and large-format shots in a set-up that, in creating the illusion of being in a house (by marking with scotch tape the rooms that ideally compose it), induces in the viewer the same emotions that the author felt in the days of isolation: a sense of claustrophobia to which only imagination could offer a way out. Silvia Camporesi has found solace in photography with a series of images that stop the flow of an everyday life always the same and document the small gestures, the objects of home life, the moments shared with the family, the simple games invented with her daughters, transfiguring them into something precious cloaked in a poetic light.

“Silvia imagined parallel worlds through everyday signs and objects and invented games and shapes together with her daughters, to deceive that time that never passed and unfolded in endless days,” the curator writes in his text. Only photography and ideas were allied to fill a void. Imagination, love and the photographic image of everyday things, translated into their meaning, made it possible to narrate a world that, without color, would have remained aphonic and boring." Domestica is the artist’s private memory, the reverse of the public project carried out at the same time, just in April 2020, that took her around Italy to document a landscape transformed by the pandemic, thus helping to create a collective memory. But the themes of the images in the exhibition-a broken cup, the remnants of lunch arranged in a plate in the shape of a smile, a peeling wall, oranges portrayed a moment before being squeezed, two little girls inventing a game to escape boredom-are subjects that belong to the everyday life of anyone who has lived through the interminable days of the lockdown and that, because of this, become universal signs.

The project is collected in a publication, available at the exhibition, published by Edizioni Postcart, with a text by the author herself. The exhibition opens Wednesday, Dec. 15, 6-9 p.m. It will remain open with Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Saturdays and Sundays, Dec. 25-26, Jan. 1-6. For info: 02.70006800 | othersizegallery@workness.it

The everydayness of lockdown in Silvia Camporesi's photos at Other Size Gallery in Milan

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