ERIK KESSELS
Ruins of Renewal
Curated by Arianna Catania
They remained silent for years, hidden in homes, preserved in family albums and personal archives, waiting to speak again. Erik Kessels brings them back into the public space, transforming them into a visual constellation. The private photographs of Gibellina’s inhabitants tell the story of the city’s reconstruction, from the late 1970s to the 1990s, capturing the work and hopes of residents and artisans who collaborated with artists and architects in the creation of the city’s cultural heritage. It is the private memory of a great social event, a collective narrative of rebirth, and of the role of the individual within a shared movement. Long fascinated by found, anonymous and vernacular images, Kessels reinterprets these iconographic materials not as historical documents, but as living traces of a lost memory. Scattered throughout the city, the photographs become presences capable of reactivating a dialogue between past and present. Ruins of Renewal is a project commissioned by Gibellina Photoroad, born from the desire to bring back to life the fascinating past of this small town with a history unique in the world. Through it, the great Dutch artist gives tangible form to the urban laboratory that Gibellina once was. The project also inaugurates a “temporary square”: not merely a place of passage or an open-air exhibition space, but a place of encounter and sharing for the community. The archive leaves the homes and returns to the city. It refounds it and rebuilds it once again, in memory as in reality. Because memory itself is reality.
BIO
Erik Kessels (Roermond, Netherlands, 1966) is a Dutch artist, curator and communication designer, with great interest in photography. Kessels is since 1996 Creative Partner of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam/London and has won many international awards. He has published over 75 books: Wonder (2003), In almost every picture (2001-2020), Shit (2018) and Read Naked (2019). Since 2000, he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography and has written the international bestseller Failed It!
He has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), Écal (Lausanne), Raffles (Milan) and at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture.
Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Mother Nature, 24HRS in Photos, Album Beauty, Unfinished Father and GroupShow. He also co-curated an exhibition called From Here on together with M. Parr, J. Schmid, C. Chéroux and J. Fontcuberta at Rencontres d’Arles 2011. In 2010 he was awarded with the Amsterdam Prize of the Arts, in 2016 nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Until 2019 his mid-career retrospective was shown in Turin, Düsseldorf, Budapest and he exhibited last year in the SFMOMA. He was called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Vogue Italia.
Special thanks to the Archive of MAC – Museo Arte Contemporanea “Ludovico Corrao” and to all the inhabitants who took part and shared their memories.
With the support of Embassy and Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Mondriaan Fonds