Mario Cresci, Misurazioni (I edizione), 1978

Mario cresci was born in Chiavari in 1942. His photographic practice investigates reality rather than producing images for their own sake. Cresci contaminates his production by including the contribution of other disciplines such as graphics, drawing, video, painting and performance. His work carried out in Basilicata from 1967 to today can be considered as one of the first interventions in Italy on the material culture of Southern Italy. Misurazioni is the sense, the way of conducting and living a field work in a very precise and rich of implications field. At the same time, it is an opportunity to analyze a behavior referring both to the photographic medium and to social reality. The photographer shoots objects initially in his own environment, then in the studio, confronting himself with the tradition of Southern Italy and with the creativity of the elderly who had made them outside of a commercial use. By juxtaposing the various images taken, Cresci creates analogies between signs, forms and meanings that bear witness to the way in which the relationship between man and the environment has created a strong identity linked to the place, passing through values of use and beliefs. The second part of the book is the result of a design course organized by the “Laboratorio Uno” cooperative in Matera. The proposal of the initiative was to intervene in the field of artistic craftsmanship, in order to create new occupational and professional areas alternative to the myth of the degree and the “fixed place”. This is where Cresci’s reflection on the historical-cultural identity of the Basilicata region comes from, which belongs not only to the past but especially to a present that continues to export labor and intellectual strength. “The Lucanian landscape as “human geography” is no longer understood as a place of contemplation (absent from the meanings of life and work that take place in it), but as the site of continuous changes due to the economic relations of a region that is too often generically relegated to the underdevelopment of the 1950s.” Mario Cresci