“Wisdom of Uncertainty is a work about awareness. About the fact that we do not exist if someone else does not perceive and describe us. We cannot exist except in relation to someone else. Each house is interdependent on the others,” says photographer Francesco Stelitano. The author of the exhibition at Villa Brivio in Nova Milanese, a few kilometres from Milan, deals with new social dynamics, uncertainty and entropy. Stelitano investigates a present poised between a state of alert for the ecosystem, the economic crisis and the loss of values in living communities.
To represent these concepts, the author takes drops of a liquid compound based on food colouring, carefully placed on a glass plate covered by a thin layer of water. “The entropy of the tiny coloured entities is activated on the wet glass. The resulting forms are bodies reproduced in moments of relationship, of expansion and in which a force of attraction is at work,” writes Laura Colantonio in the exhibition text. The exhibition set-up is designed by the architecture studio Parasite 2.0, which has created non-traditional photographic supports, contributing to the story of the complexity of the image. The set up proposes different ways of enjoying the images and keeping them moving, also reasoning on the theme of interdependence.
With his images, Stelitano invites us to look at reality with depth, and with the awareness that there are still numerous unknown unknowns to be identified and then resolved. The key word in his work is therefore “complexity”, which according to the author “does not indicate the fact that something cannot be understood, but means that the result of two elements is greater than its sum“.
Wisdom of Uncertainty can be visited until 29 January 2022.
Photographic project: Francesco Stelitano
Set design and installations: Parasite 2.0
Scientific contribution: Nathan Shammah
Scientific advice: Nathan Shammah and Flavio Moriniello
Text edited by: Laura Colantonio and Francesco Stelitano
Exhibition organized by: Fondazione Rossi in collaboration with the Free Academy of Painting “Vittorio Viviani”.
Patronage: Nova Milanese Municipality
Author: Salvatore Peluso