Exhibition

THE WAY HOME - OCEAN DRIFT

28 Jan 2017 – 28 Apr 2017

Event times

10-18

Cost of entry

free

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Agora

Berlin
Berlin, Germany

Address

Travel Information

  • U8 Leinestrasse
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This project is a personal and fragmented archive of human interactions. The exhibition traces the geometry of her journey from the Arctic to Mexico, symbolically upriving the Atlantic Current’s warmth that, coming from the Mexican Gulf, melts the northern ices of Murmansk in vaporous steam.

About

Sara’s activity as a photographer started as a diaristic practice, almost an archival project of the bodily self that could render the projections of the subject and its constant process of self-identification. The same directness - and, at times, crudeness – that can be traced in her later portraits and landscapes, maps the constellation of her own being within the constant flux of existence. “I am attracted by the endless flow of life”, says Sara. And it is emblematically so also in her last artistic project, which is ultimately a personal archive of those fragments of which human interactions and connections are made of.

In 2015, she travelled from Moscow to smaller villages and cities of the country to stop in Murmansk, on the Arctic Ocean. Venturing between harshly iced landscapes and domestic spaces, she kept tracing that human warmth that survives under thick layers of snow. Despite its position, Murmansk’s climate is mitigated by the North Atlantic Current, whose hot waters from Mexico Gulf melt the northern ices in vaporous steams.

The same kind of dynamics is sook after by Sara. The Sublime tension of the landscapes becomes more subtle and smooth in her portraits, enveloped by the intimacy of the subjects’ domestic contexts. In her tracing for "a personal, deep and existential approach to photography, a human research", her methodology is not conceptual or in a reportage format but is rather dictated by laws of instinct and jocosity, generated by details and relationships that changes her present moment. Her travel as well depends on the chain of human relations that allows her to be hosted by locals, weaving a social and personal fabric along the way to a home that becomes, ultimately, the constellation of affections that her project is made of.

There is a kind of geometry in Sara’s journey, and not only between her photographic approach and the hot Gulf Stream that dissolves Arctic’s ice, unleashing strips of earth: after her Russian experience, she went to Mexico, symbolically tracking that flux of warmth and coherently keeping the same technical and poetical approach adopted in Russia.

Dismissing the easily stereotyped chromatic language of Latin-American subjects, the use of black and white allows penetrating beyond the colourful surface to the core of her research, unveiling unexpected similitudes between these two distant contexts and blurring their borders. Following the “connection that I felt to the richness and diversity of our common humanity”, Sierra Madre’s mountains blend with those of Teriberka’s ones, dissimilar somatic traits melt into the same affectionate embracement.

In her way home, Sara gets progressively distant from her geographical abodes, drifting backwards to the origin of the very concept of it. Home becomes a metaphysical space and is understood essentially as a common ground for intimate and open human connections.

In a world of advanced globalization, the question of belonging and of human nature’s shifting is inevitable. If the condition of permanent migration and global nomadism is nowadays a matter of fact, Sara’s photography opposes to its subsequent estrangement or digital escapism a deeply humanistic solution: “I keep on searching the same closeness and intimate relation with the surrounding and the encounters I have. The more I give of myself in my experiences with the camera, the richer I get from my photography”.

Her stylistic hallmark, comparable to the crude ‘rough and blurry’ patterns of the influential Japanese Provoke Magazine, shares with this movement the same vision of photography as an ephemeral medium that is primarily based in the performative presence of the author (as in Shōmei Tōmatsu’s Blood and Rose). Nonetheless, the honest and personal involved nature of her poetics bends the harshness of this formal language into a sharp, yet attached portrait of her story. What has been said about the prominent post- Provoke photographer Nobuyoshi Araki could be said for Sara’s approach as well: “to live is to go through a sentimental journey, and to him, to photograph is to go through a sentimental journey”.

 

Giada Dalla Bontà - Curator

 

Sara Zanella - Photographer

http://www.sarazanella.com/

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