Giuseppe Dall’Arche, Molo K Marghera. L’altra Venezia. Con testi di Andrea Zanzotto, Gianfranco Bettin e Angelo Schwarz Vicenza, Terra ferma, 2007, pp. 123, ill., € 35,00 Review by Adolfo Mignemi

Enlarge text

Dall’Arche is an architecture photographer, particularly involved in the field of the territory representation. This research has been analyzed in a crucial season for Marghera’s history, between 1994 and 2004, when the signs of the past and the fascination of a future poised among doubts, illusions, wishful thinking and projects mingled in an almost incomprehensible way.
How could Dall’Arche give back the sense and the sign of all this? On one side, he wrote his research with an impeccable photographic technique and rhetoric; on the other side he deliberately excluded all images of human beings. Obviously, this presence seems implicit everywhere so that the reader has to notice the incredible subversive drive of the images published. The research moves consciously between these oppositions and contradictions, without being oppressed by the narrative language chosen by the author.
A map of Marghera and its plants guides the reader through the places where the photographs have been taken giving the chance to all the people who wishes it to visit them and to move without the fear of getting lost. It gives the chance to pass from the vision/representation of the document to the comprehension/knowledge of the reality interpreted in it by the photographer. It is definitely a valuable indication of method.