Chiara Arturo
Chiara Arturo was born in Ischia (NA) in 1984.
During her university years, in parallel with her studies in Architecture at the Federico II in Naples, she focused on photography as a means of expression, with a particular interest in landscape and space. She complements her training in the field of visual arts and begins to participate in some group exhibitions. She graduated with honors with an experimental thesis in Landscape Urbanism on environmental contamination in Campania and began working as an architectural photographer.
In 2012 she joined LAB, Antonio Biasiucci's Irregular Laboratory, which radically changed her approach to photography. You begin a research path focused on perception and insularity. Between 2014/15 she exhibits with her LAB lei at Castel dell’Ovo, at the International FotoGrafia Festival in Rome and at the SIFest in Savignano sul Rubicone with the exhibition-installation Epifanie. In 2015 she had her first solo show with “18 miles” at the Eloart Gallery (Ischia, NA).
Her work is part of some contemporary art collections such as Imago Mundi Art, Fondo Malerba, Vallicelliana Library in Rome and has been exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions, in galleries, photography festivals and museums; she has been selected for various artist residencies including BoCs Art, The Photo Solstice, Falìa, MACRO Asilo and since 2017 she is an artist in the stable of the Heillandi Gallery in Lugano.Since 2018 she with Cristina Cusani has been carrying out a project on the Mediterranean as a place of crossing and sharing as an artistic practice. Her personal research focuses on insularity, vulnerability and spatial perception in relation to the construction of the imagination. Starting from an introspective investigation, with a cartographic method, she works by accumulation and for many years on the same subjects: she digs into the landscape as she digs into herself; she explores themes and conditions of life such as transit and rest, surface and distance, the grandeur of material landscapes and their fragility, in an attempt to build an archipelago of certainties.
She currently lives between the island of Ischia, Naples and Tuscany.
"18 MILES"
Chiara Arturo's shots represent a sequence of singular horizons, fragments of a liquid, mental and tangible journey, which starts from the very need to justify the systematic crossing. For the author, photography is a cartographic survey, miles by miles, of a landscape that becomes a thought, a travel and travel memory, where the temporal and spatial scanning determines the precise choices of the composition. Chiara Arturo searches and photographs the large ships, the rocky promontories, the lighthouses that guide the journey, as if she were looking for a safe harbor at the end of each journey.
The to and fro are stories filtered through the windows of the house that welcomes Chiara every day for a few hours, forming an imaginary tempered by the salt and water that sediments along the glass. The result is a precise documentation of a timeless journey, in which, if the material destination is aware, the ideal point of arrival remains uncertain, as if the same drops of sea and rain, stretch after stretch, made it still suspended.
(Chiara Pirozzi)
