Urbanautica

MAURO CORINTI. A SPECIAL TYPE OF INNER GEOGRAPHY

by Giorgio Barbetta

«Mario Benedetti, one of the greatest South American poets, wrote: "Everyone belongs to a place on Earth and must pay homage to it". These words inspired me for this investigation into my "here", my place on Earth.»

Rhapsody is a composition characterized by freely combining different themes, often through improvisation. It is a work with a structure not designated a priori, and that feeds of virtuosity and inspiration, on the basis of a mock-up and a pre-existing repertoire. The term rhapsody reminds us of the Greek poets (rhapsodies) who recited or sang in the public square the rhyming deeds of the ancient heroes.

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018 (Details of maps and cartography)

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018 (Text by geographer Marcello Tanca)

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018 (Text by geographer Marcello Tanca)

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018 (Details of maps and cartography)

Book 'Rhapsody' by Mauro Corinti, Penisola Edizioni 2018 (Limited edition 100 copies, hand-numbered)

It is said that the ancients invented the rhyme artifice to better remember very long compositions in a time when writing did not yet exist as a support for memory. Some of these have come to us thanks to successive transcriptions that we call for example "Iliad" or "Odyssey". It sounds like an example of reversing cause and effect. However, we must not forget that it was the memory, woven into the rhyme and rhythm as ways of representing the world (or to bend it on itself to make it return and dance), to invent "men" as an effect of their own remembering through singing. What did they sing, what did they remember? Again the memory, that is the ancestors, in short, themselves and their land as a place and custody of their dead. Looking back, from the right distance, they sang their memory when they could finally see it: man is the only one in fact who sees the invisible, the absent, and is able to tell it. I can say "horse" but there is no horse here: the language is nothing but a continuous evocation of what is not there, of the sung memory, and its return as a "figure". Today we call all this "epic". Distance, variety of themes and shapes, ability to weave the different sources together, native land, memory, poetry, epic as a collective story: they are all elements that we can easily find by browsing the pages of Rhapsody, the photo book by Mauro Corinti released from the Penisola Edizioni in collaboration with Urbanautica.

«After spending many years outside - Corinti says - today I live in the city where I was born and raised: Ascoli Piceno, a city on the border between the Marche and Abruzzo. Mario Benedetti, one of the greatest South American poets, wrote: "Everyone belongs to a place on Earth and must pay homage to it". These words inspired me for this investigation into my "here", my place on Earth. Rhapsody is a project started from the desire to rediscover new meanings behind the landscapes of my daily life to return to a personal vision of the place where I live ».

After years of the rhetoric of globalization, many artists rediscover the need to root their work in a dimension that manages to keep peripheral and global together, without slipping into the excessive localism or the picturesque tourist and without chasing stereotyped "international" fashions. This is a way that is multifaceted and secularly tolerant of diversity, interested in the in-depth investigation, field research/knowledge, in the analysis of issues rooted in real situations and which, however, knows how to chase its super local connections, remote similarities, express itself in an understandable lingua franca even across borders, far from the compliance of old fences and hierarchies. Photographic research, in a time that is both mature and mutant, is today faced with the possibility of using many different languages: the photojournalistic and documentary language, purified from claims of objectivity now out of place, the lyrical and memorial approach, the conceptual interest, attention to iconography and layered signs and knows how to use everything to construct articulated works, sometimes complex, other times, as in the case of Mauro Corinti, happily "rhapsodic", that is, capable of representing a land, a people, a story with the lightness of a musical joke. Just browse through his book to realize it.

Blue small cars submerged by an ocean of white sheep, in transit between clouds of western dust in a timeless time, captured with the light style of a metropolitan street-photography teleported to the open countryside, where it will also find a trellis form of improbable Eiffel tower.

© Mauro Corinti from the series 'Rhapsody'

Peeling walls and the pale and rigorous geometries of windows and walled doors of abandoned houses. Places that speak of common life and of a past and forgotten pop iconography, the classic plaster garden lion resting in the void behind a house, even interiors with stuffed animal heads or a Fiat 500 parked in a kitchen box. Rigorous and ironic restitution of the urban environment that recalls the Italian landscape school.

© Mauro Corinti from the series 'Rhapsody'

A man without a face, we only see the arm hanging from a window of which only the frame remains, in the middle of a wall once plastered with blue. A ruin in the wild reeds, it seems that we will soon see a loop of Alec Soth's Mississippi.

© Mauro Corinti from the series 'Rhapsody'

A view from above on long fields, on landscapes reminiscent of Alexander Gronsky's early works with their epic flavor. And remotely sunk into the scene here are boys wasting time and sunbathing on the riverbank. Or a man who splits wood in the vegetable garden, or rather is motionless and observes his work, or three others crossing a field, the tall grass and they carry shields and spears, maybe they come back from a battle with the Etruscans, but what is that incongruous pylon doing in the middle of the scene? ("In the interior view from above everything changes and is moved to a special type of geography", says Mauro Corinti and there could be a no more suitable comment).

© Mauro Corinti from the series 'Rhapsody'

The most classic "documentary-style" portraits of young inhabitants, a look towards the camera halfway between a question and the demand for something unknown, taken in front of suburbs of clumsy buildings or the lace of a traditional embroidery suspended in the sun that becomes a theatrical backdrop that opens to a green landscape, a double Madonna with child stands out on the sweatshirt under dark blue lips.

Mists, and streets, and mists between electric wires or farmhouses that emerge from the black frame of a gallery, it seems a leap back to a certain popular and amateur photography that unawares refers to Luigi Ghirri.

And then again long fields that chase the winding of a road that cuts the side of a mountain making the complex stratigraphy emerge, as a symbol of the millennial accumulation of people and customs - "sedimentation of times and sensations", says Corinti - in a land where everything changes slowly, a small imperceptible shift after another (but sometimes that tension builds up too much and then there are frightful earthquakes that release that repressed anger and destroy everything).

Finally a party of veterans and alpine troops with lots of waving flags. A scene caught suddenly, from afar, like a passing photo to put on Instagram; and more and more.

«I have dedicated my attention - says Mauro Corinti - to some places that I thought I knew well, the daily spaces in which I live and walk. This project allowed me to stop and observe, perhaps for the first time, these "known" places. As if, paradoxically, their closeness, and therefore the relative habit of living them, over time had inhibited my ability to perceive them. In an attempt to tell these spaces so close to my personal story, the main effort was to imagine a different point of view than usual. The surprising thing is that gradually so many hidden elements have been revealed to me».

I believe "Rhapsody" does not want to be a scientific investigation and does not worry too much about the coherence of the styles, indeed, faithful to the title, it plays between the styles and the themes and sews them together in a personal report, a sung journey full of memories and new discoveries. So both those who have lived those places, and those who only see them for the first time, find it hard not to indulge the singing with that typical movement of the foot that keeps the rhythm like a popular song heard a thousand times or never heard before, yet so close to all of us.

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BOOK

1st edition, 2019
100 copies (hand-numbered)
23 x 28 cm
80 pages
Softcover
English and Italian
ISBN: 978-88-32108-05-7