LUOGO COMUNE

Luogo Comune, literally translated as commonplace is the result of the photographic research commissioned by the Municipality of Modena on the occasion of the call for urban photography Sguardi Civici.

The project is developed around the San Faustino district, a residential area that was established in the early 1900s in the south-west of the city of Modena around Via Giardini.Commonplace shows the epidermis of the San Faustino district, as it presents itself to its visitors, with a gaze open to an aesthetic of the ordinary. In fact, San Faustino, with its purely residential character, is characterized by a familiar - and somehow reassuring - dimension, as it is part of those everyday places of a less known Italy, an Italy far from the touristic hotspot and advertised beauties, a type of urban dimension where many of us grew up or that everyone knows, and that can be found in every province of our country.

Through a formal representation of the architecture and a seriality that repeats itself, the images speak of the physical appearance and social fabric of the neighbourhood, emphasising the uniqueness and poetry of ‘everyday things’: the single-family buildings of the 1950s and 1960s, courtyards, the shopping centre, apartment blocks, administrative buildings .Photography allows us to approach and observe those familiar places over a long period of time, picking out details and particulars that make these places unique.

The photographs play with the double meaning of the expression commonplace, understood on the one hand as the cognitive shortcut by which we tend to mistakenly recognise subjects through the characteristics assigned to the group - making the reality around us and its very identification predictable - and on the other hand the common place understood as a community space, an open place that is in everyone's imagination and belongs to everyone.