Luca Bani e Gael del Río, Oddments, 2024

Oddments is an unintentional photographic project. It reflects on the remnants of discourse, on the excesses of the processes that take place in the darkroom, on what is forgotten, as in a notebook of hastily written visual notes. It speaks of the way in which photographic fragments (evidence that is usually attributed no importance other than procedural) contain spontaneous decisions that reveal the participation of the subconscious, an underlying intention. The project therefore starts from the observation by Gael del Río and Luca Bani that all images contain condensed, unintentional narratives that, at first, they themselves are unaware of.
The secrets of each scene are gradually revealed with each manipulation of the image. In front of the enlarger, they make test strips from a negative: this involves recomposing the frame. They take notes on these test strips: this gives them new meaning. They keep them without giving them an explicit purpose: this consigns them to oblivion. They accumulate, in no particular order, in a bag: this prompts them into an inaudible dialogue. At that point, they escape their hands and their intentions. Time does its part.
One day, the plastic bag aged. Inside, the images took on a different meaning, through accumulation, coexistence, and combination: they reveal a disturbing sense of unity between them, despite having been created by two different people and originating from different places, moments, and projects. Oddments was born, in purity, when they recovered them, exhumed them, and called on them to construct their history from fragments, to create, from what is apparently dysfunctional (like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces of different sizes), something similar to a new body from the limbs of different subjects. Architectures, bodies, objects and landscapes no longer stand on their own, they are fragile and have ceased to participate in their initial nature: the change of scale has standardised them, united them. The fold is a joint, the chest a dune, the skin an abyss, the curve a meander. Everything that is prosaic becomes sublime… and vice versa: the unreachable peaks of a snow-capped mountain, a rock crowned with guano.
These trial sheets were created to be incomplete, asymmetrical like odd numbers; but at a certain point they were completed by encountering others, different, strangers: their peers. This has a human counterpart: Oddments is the result of the union of two people, of two gazes that seem to complement each other to the point of becoming indistinguishable. Oddments are residues, fragments, scraps substantivised into something greater. The baggage that accompanies Gael del Río and Luca Bani when they decide to save some sheets from their fate in the rubbish bin and transform them into a reflection on their work as photographers. Abandonment to what happens beyond their reach. The possibility of a question: what discourse emerges from the remains of discourse?