Photoessay. Time as measure of the world

The work exhibited by Domingo Milella and Fabio Barile at Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro is one from another time. In the veins of the two Apulian photographers runs the spirits of great and long gone scholars, cataloguers, nomenclators, geographers, cartographers, geologists and archaeologists, whos fixations and ambitions turned amateur activities in scientific diciplines, travelling and redesigning our planet in order to make it clear and distinct through the power of their ideas. With the slowness and curiosity — in short supply, there days — typical of that kind of explorers, the two modern adventurers have been committed for years in a phisical and conceptual query unto the ends of the given world, in a journey that deals with space and time as both mere measurable elements and ineffable art features.

If in Indexing 2001/2016, departing from Bari and heading first to the East and then to the West, Milella rediscover the misteries of the places one inhabited by now extinct cultures through the representation of the signs they left (thus producing further signs, once again for the benefit of the posterity), in An Investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution and restoration of land Barile widens his look to a broader concept of landscape, paradoxically reducing the field of vision to its constitutive evidences (reproducing and verifying in a lab, i.e. in the photo studio, their basic processes).  

Their engaging large views (and prints) reflect a complexity made of very few elements, immediately decoded with the heart and only klater with the eyes, despite a purposedly academic impersonality. In both cases, these long overviews on the world geological and cultural layering act as a contemporary vademecum of our own history, turning the past in a charted territory.