Giada Ripa – Displacement

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ProjectB presents DISPLACEMENT, the first personal exhibition of photographer Giada Ripa in Italy. Eight works will be on display, including two large triptychs and small works from Displacement series as well as Three works from her new serie Iconema , the two latest important series of this young Italian artist who lives and works in New York. In short, it's an exhibition that looks back at her artistic research and recent career.
In addition to her documentary-style approach to photography, Giada Ripa has also developed a series of works that analyse space as a means for exploring personal identity. Works that emerged during her travels through the former Soviet Union satellites countries, her explorations through the Caucasus and Central Asia, following a need to find a way of expressing her identity as a woman and young travelling artist, when the physical space becomes the stage where that identity gradually takes shape.

DISPLACEMENT

Displacement, the series that provides the title for the whole exhibition (the exclusive preview was held at the MMoMA in Moscow in December 2011- January 2012), is a photographic project that began back in 2005. In 2012, Moleskine dedicated the first photographic book to it, and this book will be presented for the first time in Italy during the exhibition.

A poetic and highly introspective anthem to the art of falling in which the human figure is portrayed in a moment of extreme fragility when the structure of the outside world collapses and identity appears unbalanced.
The protagonist of these works is a young and contemporary woman obsessively confronting herself with unknown lands (foreign and distant places loaded with symbolic stratifications and cultural, historical and geopolitical implications) where industrial culture and capitalism clash with the harshness of the environment, the climate, history, culture and religion.

“ The project Displacement began in Xinjiang, China, more than eight years ago, while I was investigating displaced minorities along the former Silk Road, the centuries-old link between the Middle East and Asia, now known as the Oil Route. Researching the accounts and origins of the people slowly led me to reflect on my own personal identity while confronting the force of the landscapes I encountered.”...”. Giada Ripa

The artist has developed a series of photos where the geographical and cultural distance of lands linked primarily with energy production (oil, gas, geothermal and renewable sources) provides the background, the essential framework sustaining the conceptual meaning of the works. Her personal search is often accompanied/inspired by the texts of geographers, anthropologists and researchers like the tales of the great explorers on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk - “The Great Game”, “The Foreign Devils on the Silk Road”.

This first exhibition in Italy and the new works from Iconema series ( term coined by the anthropologist Eugenio Turri, suggesting the idea that the landscape can be interpreted metaphorically as the «theatre» of human activities, the scenario where man is both actor and spectator at the same time – transforming territories and benefiting from them) mark the artist's return to her origins; the urge to work in Italy, her homeland territory, in the spirit of a “European Grand Tour”, after a long journey through distant lands.

BIOGRAPHY:

Born in London and brought up in Brussels, Giada Ripa lives and works between New York and Milan. She began her career in 2000, after studying at the ICP in New York, working both as a correspondent photographer (Grazia Neri) for some of the most important Italian and foreign magazines, and progressively as artist photographer dealing with more personal projects.
Since then, Giada Ripa Ripa has roamed the world, using its topographies as a backdrop for her examinations of personal dislocation in both public and private space.
Her works have been displayed in Italy, Belgium, Spain, the United States, Korea, China and Russia. Most of her projects have concentrated on China, Central Asia and on the Caucasus. Her first personal Museum exhibition was held at the MMoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in Moscow, in 2011.
Since then she has published two books: The Invisible Pipeline (commissioned by ENI) and
Displacement, the first photography book published by Moleskine.
Ripa was a finalist for the Terna Award in 2009 and has just been nominated for the prestigious PRIX PICTET Award (the leading global award for photography and sustainability).