La città che non c’è, Largo Bartolomeo Perestrello: Rob Hornstra, The Sochi Project Posters Realoaded – Cardboard barricades and paper planes for peace; Michael Trutta, Enciclopedia visiva delle diverse metodologie di sistemazione di insiemi di oggetti – LIBRO, curated by Beatrice Puddu and Michael Trutta

In Tor Pignattara, in the eastern quadrant of Rome, there is a special place where people come together to imagine a common space; it is called “La città che non c’è”. Every year the festival expands a bit, this year the festival starts from the Piazza che non c’è (otherwise known as Piazza Perestrello) to arrive at Largo Bartolomeo Perestrello with two photographic installations that will animate the market spaces.

La città che non c’è is a free festival open to all and sundry, and that is precisely why support is needed. Get involved in crowdfunding!

In 2010, Mandeep’s spaces hosted an exhibition of 5 posters from the legendary The Sochi Project-then in its infancy-in which photographer Rob Hornstra and writer/filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen had decided to follow, for the next 5 years, the changes taking place in the area of Sochi, Russia, where the Winter Olympic Games would be held in 2014. The exhibition, flanked by urban actions spread with images and slogans of the Sochi Project on the streets of San Lorenzo, Pigneto, Monti, Ostiense and Testaccio, and curated by 3/3, was intended to highlight the paradoxes of Russian politics on the one hand and to support with support the forms of Slow Journalism and intelligent self-production, at a time in history-which has never ended and we are living through ever more clearly-when the pluralism and objectivity of the press and information are seriously threatened by the dramatically current dynamics of superficial consumption of information.

Ten years later, we have decided to put the posters back into circulation in an installation at Piazzale Perestrello where, reversing the sense of their common use, small pacifist barricades made from the unsold boxes are transformed into temporary seating, unstable micro pillars on which to find momentary rest, impromptu sculptures, and the posters into reduced mountains of paper that turn into large airplanes that, although they cannot in fact fly, ideally send messages of peace for the world.

The posters will be available to visitors through a free will offering, with all proceeds going to support the Palestinian people.

Rob Hornstra is a Dutch photographer who focuses primarily on long-term documentation projects, often producing self-published books. In 2009 he started with Arnold Van Bruggen The Sochi Project, which ended with the book An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus and an exhibition that toured Europe, America, India and Canada. He is the founder of FOTODOK – Space for Documentary Photography. For the past few years he has been working on a long-term project on Europeans.

Stefano Ruffa, founder of Mandeep Phtography and beyond is now the soul of Oneroom, a library-bookstore and Open Studio in the heart of Rome. The founders of 3/3, Chiara Capodici and Fiorenza Pinna continue their work in photography on separate paths that sometimes intersect. Chiara founded the bookstore and design space Leporello – photobooks et al. and Fiorenza continues her work as a curator, bookdesigner and educator.

Are accumulations in themselves harmful experiences? How can they possibly be managed?
What is the point of categorizing? Does it make sense to use categorical criteria? Is there a better way than another?

The exhibition is an excerpt from Michael Trutta’s latest project in which he analyzes 12 different kinds of places-an abandoned building, a nursery, the municipal office unearthed objects…-united by the fact that they have a large number of objects to be managed and focuses on the function of the book, par excellence a portable and easily archived object that by its very nature contains information whose historical value it preserves by cataloging it.

Michael Trutta’s Encyclopedia is a project somewhere between a technical manual, a furniture maker’s catalog, and a book to play with: a reflection on the nature of photography as a document, here a visual tool for cataloging, highlighting how labile categorical criteria are, how context changes perception about the object presented, the infinite amount of possibilities, and how fun it can be to get lost among them.

Each chapter houses a set of main objects that characterizes the place on which the arrangement methodology is based, and secondary objects that serve as accompaniments to the main object, often stacked without a criterion. The still lives of the main objects that interpret the specific cataloging implemented in each place are accompanied by the secondary objects arranged according to a new personal criterion.

Placed in different places and contexts, the book is used as a container of rare stamps inside a numismatic store, as a historical document inside the library, as a cheap object inside the flea market, as a mysterious and ownerless object inside the lost and found. The images in the exhibition present the different cataloging methodologies used in the four locations and the invented sequence for arranging secondary objects: by quantity of pages, by size… The space available was used to demonstrate how much the vision changes between an orderly and disorderly set, how much submitting to a grid/scheme can alter the images and documents, and how errors, even trying to perform perfect objective cataloging, will always be present.

The presence of the bookcase and the ability to pick up and move books is an invitation to the user to try to imagine an alternative arrangement to the classic alphabetical order, an effort of imagination in an area where it is not usually used.

The exhibition catalog, on display at Leporello’s for the entire festival period, is a binder containing each image or fragment of image mosaic, the captions, the title, all printed with an office printer.

Here the program!