Assunta D'Urzo
Born in 1982, she was born in Torre Del Greco.
She has a degree in Modern Literature and in Photography. Her career path between the first humanistic degree and the second in Fine Arts is an important link between the two worlds: she is a room assistant and didactic operator at the Madre Museum in Naples for 5 years. After winning the first edition of "Fotogrammi" (2011) of the Naples Film Festival, you frequent the direction of Corriere del Mezzogiorno online as a photojournalist. The subject of the graduation thesis at the Academy, "Family readings", her photographic reflection on her family of origin, will be the basis of the work developed in the two years of Irregular Workshop (2012-2014) under the guidance of the teacher. Antonio Biasiucci. “A familiar look” (2014) this is the new name of the project, it becomes a path of both artistic and existential awareness. The photograph follows the body like a domestic landscape and the investigation of the autobiographical ordinary is the first parameter of observation of reality; thus the family becomes the place of origin of the gaze. The workshop ends with a group exhibition, Epifanie, in Castel dell’Ovo, April 2014. Epifanie will also be hosted during the International Festival of Rome, XIII edition, Macro Museum and at SI FEST # 23.
Since 2013 she has been conducting artistic workshops at the Casa dei Cristallini, an association that works to stem school dropout in the Rione Sanità. The constant exercise of drawing practiced together with the children of the Cristallini, provides her research with the tools to achieve an abstraction of the photographic sign. In the summer of 2014, she, Hval-the whale, begins the search for the abyss. The work halfway between photography and the epic novel laboriously enters woods and ruins, in dark and underground caverns, in search of a figure, a necessary form, in order not to be shipwrecked. The whale, with its large wounded body-world, is an obsessive investigation of the present.
"A Familiar Gaze"
The shots of Assunta D’urso are an autobiographical tale, an intimate discourse of interpretation of materials and physiognomies belonging to a domestic landscape. The photographer directs the lens towards her family unit, where the investigation into her bodies and forms becomes a reflection on self-knowledge, sought through the unfiltered and daily vision of parents and sister. Assunta D’Urso creates an album of family photographic memories in which the shot is necessarily detached from the anniversary and the ordinary becomes fruitful interest. The observation of the sweetness of confidential gestures becomes for the photographer the measure of reality, a relationship of comparison and comfort with the outside world.
The family is understood as the first source of knowledge of the world, it is an awareness that the photographer interprets by lingering on portions of bodies, often made uncertain, awkward, insecure by the photograph, but never violated, always full of love and attention between those who photograph and those who are portrayed. The shots of Assunta D’urso are tools of analysis, of self-awareness through the closest others.
(Chiara Pirozzi)
