Petra Stavast, S75 curated by Laura De Marco

Petra Stavast finally returns to Rome on the occasion of the opening of her exhibition S75, curated by Laura De Marco.

On the occasion of the opening Petra will also present together with Laura De Marco the book, from which the exhibition is inspired, and she will talk to us about Ramya, published in 2014 and for us still a fundamental example of narrative weaving in the form of a photobook, and the collective volume Calamita/Calamity.

“S75 is a project named after the Siemens S75 mobile phone: launched in 2005, it was Stavast’s first mobile phone with a built-in camera, with a maximum resolution of 1280 × 960 pixels. In S75 Stavast encloses 224 portraits of people from his daily life, but rarely of friends or family, all taken in the studio using the technology, now considered obsolete, of this phone. The series is made over a period of seventeen years, between 2005 and 2022 in Amsterdam, Banff, and Shanghai.
The technical limitations of the camera are a central feature of the work: the low resolution of the images and the classical poses of the portrayed subjects result in a timeless, disjointed space that is neither present nor past.

The portraits convey an eerie feeling of formal and emotional instability between stagnation and transition, and create a visual stillness that seems closer to painting than to photography. The portrait series confronts that precise, brief moment when the person portrayed and the photographer are together: the tensions and expectations of both are visible parts of the final result. The portraits evoke a tension between the digital character of the low-resolution camera and the image that harkens back to the classical art of portraiture. The fact that with the Siemens S75 the photographic technique cannot be controlled is essential to Stavast’s work, and this concept was translated in the photo book, published by the prestigious Dutch publisher Roma Publications, through the choice of an equally difficult-to-control printing technique, gravure. This choice involves a kind of tension between the digital nature of phone photos, which can be shared and reproduced indefinitely, and the association of mass production with gravure printing. In addition, the paper and the printing technique enhance the grainy appearance of the photographs, giving them a softness reminiscent of those being sought with filters today, and the thinness of the paper causes the pages to unfurl gently and slowly, giving for all intents and purposes a sense of the vastness of this long-term project.”

From the text by Laura de Marco for the exhibition at Spazio Labo’

In collaboration with Spazio Labo’; with support from Mondriaan Fund