Claudio Gobbi | Tales of Europe

About

Over the last 20 years, the Italian-born Berlin-based photo-artist Claudio Gobbi, has been working with photography on projects investigating the history of Europe, its collective memory and the concepts of borders. His research is rooted in a conceptual approach that uses the tradition of documentary photography as its starting point but broadens its horizons. 

The exhibition Eine Europäische Erzählung presents one of the long-term projects of the artist. This research and open series, started in 2002, investigates the iconography of the 20th century theatre throughout Europe. As Gobbi explains: "One of the central themes of my work is the search for recurring features that can be considered as defining elements of a culture. In the theatres, Japanese gardens or Armenian churches the main aim is to find an image that represents the evidence of a specific community, a symbol of belonging or the sign of a cultural boundary".

The series on the theatres covers over 25 countries - from Portugal to Russia, from France to Turkey - and traces a possible geography of the continent, a cultural journey through space and time, from which these places emerge as examples of shared memory, forms of perpetuation of a collective identity that seems outdated but still resists. The photographs highlight the permanent features as opposed to what changes: persistence, in fact.

“Theaters are not about places where European history becomes visible, but about the continuation, in the present, of a sociopolitical discourse on cultural production and values. In the spirit of Michel Foucault, they turn out to be symbolic orders that master and mirror the fundamental codes of a culture, its language, its ways of perception, exchange habits, techniques, values, the hierarchies of its practices, and which position themselves between scientific theories and explanations”. Excerpt from the text by Harald F. Theiss