FRANCESCA SERAVALLE
Magnification
A conscious act of seeing
Magnification is a fragment of the whole image that becomes a new photograph: it is born from the cut, from the re-composition with the original image, and from the exposition in a new context by displacing its semantic field. Blow-ups of albumins, calotypes, cyanotypes, collodion prints, silver salts, platinum prints, photogravures, and halftones expose an archaic beauty: squares, dots and lines, colours that come together like brushstrokes, new textures reminiscent of natural surfaces and skins. Magnification celebrates the bewilderment and floating of the eye in its details, decoding reality with a new, poetic language through its technique.
Seravalle triggers an intervention of ecology of the image in order to re-see: enlargement controls the visible, makes the unseen perceptible, and creates new epiphanic connections of aesthetics of the onsets of the society of image reproduction. The discourse on the photographic print, the objects it produces, the subjects it involves and the experience it generates eliminates the boundary between documentary and art photography.
BIO
An international curator, Seravalle is also an author: she transforms archive materials into video art and installations through de-contextualization. She recently curated The Performing Photobook a sensory and ASMR exhibition and fair for Format23 in the UK. She worked for Magnum Photos Paris and collaborated with Erik Kessels and the Archive of Modern Conflict. After leading the curatorial and archival team at Fabrica, Benetton, she taught at the Marangoni Institute in London and LSBU. Visiting lecturer on curating and photographic appropriation at several universities including ECAL, UCL, Glasgow College, UWE Bristol, IMT, and Officine Fotografiche. As a curator, she supports artists from concept to layout such as Vitturi’s Dalston Anatomy, Pfaff’s Alex & Me, Zari’s The Y, and de Mayda’s Era Mare. She also curated exhibitions at MAXXI, Triennale, Photographers’ Gallery, Foam, CNA, and IMA Gallery. With the exhibition Until Proven Otherwise, on the evidence of the first photos she won the Paul Hill Award, then exhibited in open-air shows in Bari, Puntasecca, and Wroclaw European Capital of Culture. Her short films were screened at the Venice Film Biennale, London Photo Fair, Photo Saint Germain, UNSEEN in Amsterdam, and Suzhou Design Week (China). Her texts and curatorial work have been published by RVB, AMC, SPBH, Trolleybooks, Montanari, and Witty Books.