Pietro Catarinella: Out of Rome

About

A pioneer in bringing together theatre, social creativity and green technology, Arcola Theatre presents Green Arcola Gallery, a new platform in Dalston for visual artists engaging with sustainability. With this programme hosted in the theatre foyer, Arcola aims to extend its long-standing practice of working with artists to engage cultural audiences, and showcase the diverse ways contemporary visual arts address issues of science, sustainable design and climate change. From his initial education as an architect, Pietro Catarinella retains a curiosity towards the urban and a methodology to scrutinise living spaces. His photographic practice questions the everyday and explores the margins of the ordinary. In his series Out of Rome, Catarinella wanders along the rapidly evolving periphery of Italy's largest city, waiting for encounters to occur and for the unexpected to manifest. The journey does not follow a linear narrative or a pre-empted protocol. Its trajectory recalls Dada's urban strolls or the Situationist's drifts. Any attempt to define such space of the in-between would be self-defeating: there is no clear-cut boundary between city and province, inside and outside, ‘us' and ‘them'. Avoiding any statement, Catarinella's photographs expose strange cohabitations between actors of a complex network, to use Bruno Latour's ecosystemic terminology — local inhabitants, migrant workers, sheep, dogs, flowers, architectures. A blurred border lies also between the documentary nature of the project and the fiction it creates: multiple stories can be read in those dense and deserted territories. The artist takes the role of an itinerant archaeologist, unearthing apparently modest but highly meaningful events from the elusive magma of the urban unconscious. Catarinella's work finds a striking resonance in the ongoing mutations of Dalston, such as the uncertain development plans for the area that includes the Dalston Eastern Curve Garden. In the words of the artist, new urban margins ‘aren't built around a public space, a monument or a church, they are planned in a random way generally surrounding a big shopping mall. A space without quality and references, in which the human became the perfect victim and executioner of itself'. Green Arcola Gallery is curated by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, with the support of the Green Arcola team. For more information: verletbottero@gmail.com