With Hectar (Ettaro), Bologna breaks away from the conventional concept of beauty, seeking its own authentic dimension that can reveal the essence of phenomena. These photographs, devoid of recognisable subjects, invite us to immerse ourselves in an iconic journey, in a no-man's land, where the random and the overlooked find redemption. Bologna's works represent a chronicle of human and natural traces, in a landscape where man is physically absent but his presence is palpable through signs of existence.
With critical texts by Angela Madesani and Lóránd Hegyi, Hectar (Ettaro) is a unique photographic project, conceived and realised from 2017 to 2022, exploring the southern suburbs of Milan, in particular the area of Cascina Battivacco, where the artist captured daily images of the terrain during walks with his dog, using a simple mobile phone.
This artistic process, which began almost by chance, turned into a ritual and temporal practice, suspended in time, where each photograph sent to a small group of friends generated different responses, creating a dialogue between images and words.
As the project evolved, the author began to explore the idea of building an archive, a hectare of photography that grows on itself, consciously filtering the images through the lens of an old mobile phone to highlight the limits of the medium.
However, as the artist himself emphasises, "At the moment of transforming into a project something that was born free of expectations and aims, totally spontaneous, I felt the need to lay bare the medium used to confront the malice of the compromised gaze. This is why I decided to show at Lab 1930 a sub-category of the same project that consists of blurring the images, thus making them even less recognisable".
The attentive poetics of his gaze transmutes that expanse of land, seemingly without memory or identity, into many short and intense narratives, in which one can really lose oneself, revealing the details that he puts in order, lined up one by one, words of an infinite visionary story.
Angela Madesani: "Pietro Bologna's images are intense, poetic, refined, both when they come out of his darkroom, a much-loved place, and when they are made with a mobile phone as in this case. Analogue, digital: marginal issues. His works are polished, never affected, refined in the most banal and vacuous sense of the word.
