Home » Getting lost and finding yourself in the Po Valley – Giovanna D’Ascenzi (Photo)

Getting lost and finding yourself in the Po Valley – Giovanna D’Ascenzi (Photo)

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Getting lost and finding yourself in the Po Valley – Giovanna D’Ascenzi (Photo)

The upper Po state road connects Turin to Venice, crossing the northern part of the Po valley, where the Italian productive and industrial heart is historically concentrated.

We are in that part of the country that in the nineties the Northern League (today only the Lega) had renamed Padania, invoking the secession from “thieving Rome” and from the south, despised as welfare aid. An identity battle that over the years has developed a protectionist, anti-European and racist rhetoric.

Tomaso Clavarino, photographer born in Turin in 1986, grew up in these places without ever feeling part of them. In his latest book, Padanistanaccompanies us on a path that evolves from a sense of strangeness in the search for a connection with a territory that is detested but for which it feels the need to create a new narrative, which goes beyond the idea of ​​a presumed Po Valley identity.

However, when we talk about the project, Clavarino immediately states that Padanistan it arises from a personal, not a political, need. Since 2018 he has made several trips that are repeated in the following three years. The choice of practice on the road, inspired more by Alec Soth and Paul Graham than by Luigi Ghirri or Guido Guidi, it is an escape, an escape from the pain of mourning, which however begins to take on a more precise form over time. Personal or political, or perhaps both, in its essential layout – there are never captions to specify dates and places – Padanistan it builds a social geography revealing a crisis in the tireless and productive north model that we have been told about.

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Clavarino immerses himself in this landscape, desolate and impersonal, in a controlled way: in order not to get lost, he sets precise geographical limits and uses, as in his previous works, the 6×7 format, a frame that forces you to focus on the details without letting it look is lost in the horizon. But who is browsing Padanistan experiences exactly the opposite effect, and here is the skill of the photographer, able to work within pre-established boundaries to build an atmosphere of disorientation, in which to get lost and understand that, after all, Padania does not exist.

Also contributing to this process is Peter Bialobrzeski, a German photographer who in his portraits of urban spaces, especially in Asia, moves between art and documentary. For the first time, Clavarino lets himself be joined by someone in editing and, while working with a very different author, he knows that this collaboration can prove to be an interesting challenge, because the alien gaze of a non-Italian colleague offers him the opportunity to free his works from the visual conditioning of a photographer who returns to known places.

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