Urbanautica

AN ABSENCE THAT TASTES OF A LOST PARADISE ONCE AGAIN

by Steve Bisson

«In fact, never as in modernity things overflow from their course to lie forgotten, as messengers not so much of past vestiges but of convulsive and frenetic transformations that take away more and more space to people. And all this appears today to attack the very arc of existence, causing disorientation, loss of identity references.»

© Lorenzo Mini from the series 'Ospedali e Manicomi' part of 'Identità Perdute'

© Lorenzo Mini from the series 'Razionalismo Abbandonato' part of 'Identità Perdute'

Absence is a password in Lorenzo Mini's photographic reconnaissance. It is a mental condition that expands into physical space. In a recent photographic series, he uses the title Altrove ('Elsewhere'). What is elsewhere? It is a sort of positioning that expresses the need to be different in the world, or even the attempt to access another reality of things. The photographer, like any attentive observer, also seeks this position in various ways. We can say that Lorenzo Mini motivates it through absence. Partially, it finds justification in the author's homeland, that is, a territory that borders the Adriatic Sea and which coexists with strong seasonality. He is originally from Cesenatico, a well-known tourist region on the Romagna Riviera, in Italy. These places at the end of the summer are literally emptied, thus leaving a huge space that Lorenzo Mini tends to occupy with his reflections, with his "position" precisely.

© Lorenzo Mini from the series 'Altrove'

© Still images from the film 'Amarcord', by Federico Fellini, 1973

This posture, in the Altrove ('Elsewhere') series, corresponds to the absence of references and is manifested visually in the fog that hides the horizon, giving the objects an almost totemic aura. The author reminds the scene from the film 'Amarcord' (1973) when the character Titta (director's alter ego) get lost in a thick fog that has made everything disappear and suddenly he starts wondering if the afterlife will look like the same: free from people, trees, birds, and wine. Titta appears lost until a friend reminds him that the house is right behind him. Finally, the child arrives and definitively breaks the spell, and boldly leaves to go to school. The one portrayed by Mini is an equally contemplative, but less hopeful, vision broken by the whistle of the so-called "fischione", better known as a foghorn. The reference to modernity and its unsolved dramas is a recurring motif in Mini's work. Here the mechanical sound of the loudspeaker seems to replace the chant of the sirens, guides in an afterlife of neoplatonic reminiscence. The sound, however, remains imperceptible in the photo as if to highlight an insurmountable limit of the medium.

© Lorenzo Mini from the series 'Razionalismo Abbandonato' part of 'Identità Perdute'

Various other photographic series develop around the theme of abandonment or absence of life. Whether it's railways, hospitals, and asylums, summer colonies, rationalist architecture, the guiding thread remains the same. Man in the midst of the ruins reflects on the transience of things, in all their abundance. In fact, never as in modernity things overflow from their course to lie forgotten, as messengers not so much of past vestiges but of convulsive and frenetic transformations that take away more and more space to people. And all this appears today to attack the very arc of existence, causing disorientation, loss of identity references. Like a current that drags memories away from man to leave him at the mercy of events while holding a handful of slags from the past.

© Lorenzo Mini from the series 'Visionitaliane'

In a series entitled "Dal Mare (From The Sea)", Lorenzo Mini focuses on objects and garbage found on the Cesenatico beach. Here the absence is explained by the loss of humanity, a mirror of an increasingly hedonistic mentality. We, therefore, find another reference to modernity and the emergence of the consumer civilization that interferes with environmental balances. This absence of humanity also translates into the growing anonymity of the landscapes. The issue is well addressed in the work dedicated to the land crossed by the Strada Romea, in which the author is able to trigger visual short circuits. He places himself in a forgotten elsewhere, almost insignificant, vernacular, at times irreverent, and subtly anthropological, and he witnesses his inhabitants, his countrymen. In doing so, the human manifests himself precisely in the absence and invites us to rethink the fact of being in the world. This posture represents an almost philosophical attitude, which in Italian photography, particularly in this region of Emilia Romagna, has found illustrious predecessors in the past. Luigi Ghirri above all. A sort of remedy for widespread nihilism well-rooted here thanks to the planning of resignation and that pushes towards the problematization of the obvious.

© Lorenzo Mini from the series 'Strada Romea'

Absence is also nostalgia. Here I refer specifically to that atavistic melancholy that we often carry with us without knowing why. A restless solitude, a social malaise, which now masks a real collective neurosis. Modernity has desecrated any form of resistance to civilization understood as an idle submission to the markets and, consequently, it has generated boundless loneliness among the disobedient, the expelled, the non-followers, or among those who prefer not to be satisfied with homogenized knowledge. With the series Figli di un circo minore ('Sons of a minor circus') Mini sheds light on a circus-like tale, and project a scent of being together otherwise, of moving freely, of forced coexistence with the animal factory, of common survival, of a perhaps a more sincere "we". Yet those times are difficult to remember. And even the circus is no longer that real family of which we cultivate a secret longing.

Lorenzo Mini's most recent work is titled There is no one here. Perhaps it is what more than other series expresses us unequivocally the absence, described in detail, almost palpable. Benches, squares, parking lots, streets, swimming pools, paths, courtyards, slides, sidewalks, houses, gardens, we are facing an empty glossary. An urban plot in which a deafening silence reigns. Yet looking closely, on the margins of all this, life sustains itself. Maritime pines, laurel hedges, oleanders, ivy, and many other plant species seem to mock human reasons. Of their foolish progress towards oblivion, of their vain sinking into absence.

An absence that tastes again of a lost paradise.

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Thank you to Lorenzo Mini for contributing with his images to this writing.

Lorenzo Mini
Urbanautica Italy

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