Valeria Laureano
Born in Naples in 1989.
She graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures with a specialization in Visual Arts, Music and Performing Arts at the University of Salerno. (2011)
Transferred to Rome she attended a three-year Master's at the Roman School of Photography. (2011 - 2014)
The interest in the realization of personal projects and authorial research has become stronger and stronger during my training period.
His recent works revolve around the memory and rediscovery of a lost memory.
Returning to Naples in 2017, she started working with the Magazzini Fotografiche exhibition space as coordinator and photographer. In the same year he exhibited the Apice project at CIEE, San Paolo, Brasil.
Since 2018, together with other artists, she has followed the visual research of Body Island Project as a photographer for the creation and writing of itinerant performances and exhibitions on the theme of the relationship between man and the island.
The concept of body in art has also become the central pivot of his personal project inspired by the exhibition by Robert Mapplethorpe, "Choreography for an exhibition", hosted by the Madre Museum and inaugurated in December 2018. The work, still being developed , is part of the photographic laboratory created by the Museo Madre in collaboration with Magazzini Fotografia.
In 2019, together with Roberta Fuorvia, he created the Photo Words Lab laboratory, a writing and photography laboratory.
"Amalìa"
disturbing adj. [part. pres. to disturb]. – Exciting, provocative; which arouses inner turmoil, awakening anxieties and highly emotional states of mind. […]
Roland Barthes wrote that what can be defined never really stings; instead it is the impossibility of defining that becomes a good symptom of disturbance.
In Valeria Laureano's photographs this intrinsic dualism emerges between the circumscription of a phenomenon and the fascination given by the impossibility of fully understanding it, an assumption that applies to the human mind – sectioned in every possible study, yet still so elusive -, as well as for the same female figure, called to embody many different roles - from angel of the hearth to seductive devil - and therefore difficult to harness in a single definition. In these photographs, where the original suggestion of the story of the serial killer known as Correggio's saponifier can be recognized in the gloomy atmospheres and in the recurrence of body fragments, one breathes a murky air, accentuated by decadent interiors and mysterious figures.
Disturbing and restless, the women who appear in these images are potentially architects and victims of spells; each subject oscillates between an active and passive dimension: enchanter and enchanted, seductive and seduced, a fluctuation that also affects objects, interiors, landscapes.
The thread of the story gets lost in possible micro-stories that have as common thread the invitation to be enchanted, seduced, bewitched, in a continuous contraction between the attractive and the repelling.
Extract from the critical text LAB03: between words and images by Alessandra Troncone
