Wednesday 11th e Saturday 14th of November, Francesca Cao, Temporary Life

The earthquakes have opened some tears in the fragile geological and social fabric of Italy; tears often never mended, which have left deep traces on the territory. After the earthquake that hit Abruzzo in 2009, the photographer Francesca Cao started a project of ‘mapping’ of the country, in search of the residues of the past earthquakes: of emergency architectures, and of all the attempted and failed reconstructions. Elements that have marked the post-seismic landscape also in the ways and forms of life of the affected communities. Balsorano, Montevago, Sant’Angelo a Scala, Messina, Poggio Reale, L’Aquila. Everyone, in the calm and stillness of the places photographed by Francesca Cao, has his own earthquake in his head. Each one holds in a different way the memory of an event that changed – in different ways and intensities, but with constantly disruptive consequences – the history of men, things and cities.The dust has settled. The echo of the cries of the survivors vanished, the sirens of the ambulances faded, the extraordinary edition of the news is over. Italy has turned its attention elsewhere, starting to look forward again. Francesca at that point has chosen to go back. With the patience and attention of those who want to sew together a story of ghosts and silent resistances, of memories and expectations, of landscapes and interrupted lives. A story that is revealed today in the pages of the book Temporary Life – edited by DER * LAB and published by Postcart – to evoke the idea of a “temporary” life, left on hold, waiting to move in a better future.

Irene Alison from Leporello’s sofa and Francesca Cao in streaming from Milan will talk about Temporary Life.

Francesca Cao is an Italian Documentary Photographer, she studied philosophy in Milan and worked with the photographer Mauro Galligani. In 2006 moves to New York to attend the International Center of Photography. In 2008 earns the Tierney fellowship for her work The Lion of Central Asia, that has been exposed at the New York Photo festival ’09.In 2009 was selected for Descubrimientos of PhotoEspana and attended the Eddie Adams workshop. In 2011 the story of Ernestina, a woman that has been living in an asbestos temporary house for thirty years as a consequence of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, becomes an exhibition along with the pictures of the photographer Michela Palermo, called My Broken World, that  travels through Milan, Rome, Rimini, Avellino, Foiano Fotografia festival and Bisaccia. In the same year starts working on the book project for her work The Lion of Central Asia. In 2012 the project The Lion of Central Asia is selected for the Inge Morath award.