Please join us in the Bookshop and meet photographer Federico Clavarino who is presenting his recent book Hereafter, published by Skinnerboox.
On the night Federico Clavarino will be in conversation with the curator, writer and photographer Benedetta Casagrande.
They will be looking at the narrative strategies deployed in Hereafter, which builds upon family photographs and oral recollections, to discuss how the uncomfortable and conflicting narratives present in colonial histories can be used to produce a reflexive viewer, one suspended between memory and history, affection and reflection.
Hereafter is based on the story of the photographer's grandparents. For over thirty years John and Mary Phillips worked in the Sudan, Libya, Oman, Jordan and Cyprus. They witnessed the progressive decline of the British Empire, in which they had lived since childhood and which shaped their view of the world. Federico Clavarino recovered letters, photographs, documents and memoirs that he then used as a guide to carry out his own photographic work in Oman, Jordan, Sudan and England.
Hereafter addresses the making of collective memory by rearranging found material together with Clavarino's photographs and excerpts taken from conversations, so as to mimic the selective, unconscious, and combinatory process of recollection. It is an attempt at deconstructing the family's narrative, one imbued by colonial discourse, and at doing so by locking past images into a dialectical relationship with contemporary images, thus showing how the Empire still lives on as a ghostly presence or an inherited symptom.
Federico Clavarino is a photographer and teacher. He studied creative writing at Alessandro Baricco's Scuola Holden in Turin and documentary photography at Fosi Vegue's BlankPaper Escuela in Madrid. He is currently pursuing a Master of Research degree at the Royal College of Art in London. Clavarino's works revolve around issues of power, history and representation. He has published six books so far.
Benedetta Casagrande is an Italian curator, writer and photographer. Graduated with a BA in Photography from the University of Brighton in 2016, she has recently concluded an MA in Art History and Museum Curating with Photography at the University of Sussex. Casagrande is one of three founders of Ardesia Projects, a curatorial project dedicated to contemporary photography with a three-fold aim: to unburden artists from production costs, promoting economically sustainable work relationships, to create a positive platform for artists to network, meet and support each other, and, lastly, to create a discursive bridge between the Italian and British photographic landscape.
Copies of Federico's most recent book Alvalade, published by XYZ, will be available as well.
Thu 12 Dec, 18.00 - 20.00, Bookshop.
Free event, no Booking.
