Hidden Collections, by Giorgio Di Noto. Published by Quodlibet

Fabio Severo in conversation with Giorgio Di Noto, Alessandro Dandini de Sylva, and David Mozzetta

Giorgio Di Noto has progressively explored photography as an unstable, ambiguous medium, constantly poised between documentation and invention. This trajectory finds a new expression in his research conducted in the storerooms, restoration laboratory, and photographic archive of the Museo Nazionale Romano: spaces usually inaccessible to the public, where the past is not exhibited but preserved, cataloged, and prepared for future viewing. Here, the artist engages with collections of sculptures, mosaics, frescoes, epigraphs, and everyday objects from the Republican era to the late Empire, as well as plates, negatives, prints, and slides relating to archaeological excavations, restorations, and documentation of finds from the early 20th century to the present day. In this crossover, Di Noto’s photography becomes both a stratigraphic and poetic tool, capable of questioning not only the artifacts themselves, but also the photographic images that document them, and with them the technical and cultural conditions of their representation. Digging through images of archaeology, traces of a complex process of manipulation emerge which, in order to isolate the finds, erases and obscures, transforming the act of making visible into a gesture of subtraction. Thus, the document becomes a find, the masking is reversed into revelation, the technical intervention is revealed as a creative act. Entrusting a visual artist with the interpretation of the hidden heritage of the Museo Nazionale Romano means recognizing that archaeology, like photography, is never neutral: it is a practice of choice, of montage, of constructing meaning. Di Noto’s work seems to remind us that every archive holds more than it declares; that photography is not only a document but also a language; that every image is never an accomplishment but a process and that over time it continues to reopen, transform, and generate other images.

With texts by Edith Gabrielli, Agnese Pergola, Alessandro Coco, and Andrea Pinotti and a conversation between Giorgio Di Noto and Alessandro Dandini de Sylva