For her first solo exhibition in Leeds, Eva Frapiccini staged a series of photographic installations addressing the relationship between the visual and haptic dimension of photography.
Frapiccini's work is often represented by archival long-term projects on social and political changes taking the form of interactive installations, where visitors are physically engaged.
During the period of the exhibition, the Project Space was exposed to a series of photographic installations developed after long research fields in Cairo in 2012, in Italy in 2017 and 2018.
Fortepiano | Soundtrack under Tahrir Square (2016) is an installation composed of an audio recording and a concertina-postcards with 30 shots of the artist taken from the same point of view each day of her stay in Cairo, in 2012. The shape of this photographic installation is directly inspired by the digital skyline produced by the audio recordings of demonstrations realised by the artist from her flat in Cairo, in 2012. Fortepiano deals with the difficulty of speaking on political/social changes happening in the present.
The Spirit of Resistance (2018) is composed of a series of photographs printed on perforated PVC, and taken in the territories destroyed by the earthquake in the Center of Italy.
Words without Action poison the Soul (2018) is an archival structure, and an artist book designed by the artist on the struggle on Antimafia movement in Sicily during the two Wars of Mafia happened from 1970s to 1990s in Italy.
The installation externally appears as a single cubic body, internally is composed of 6 modules mounted vertically on drawers that can be pulled out as individual photographic racks. The viewer is invited to physically “enter” the cube and to view each of the photographs as the original handwritten documents representing everyday tools, such as speeches, registers, notebooks, of magistrates, activists and journalists killed by Cosa Nostra.
Similarly, the publication reminds to the physicality of the documents collected from different family archives by the artist. Turning its pages, the viewer can see both sides of the original documents hand-written by the victims of Mafia.
The project has been awarded for the Italian Council Award by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, and the installation has been originally commissioned as a site-specific installation at the Municipal Archive of Palermo,during Manifesta 2018.
Project Space: 5–18 September 2019
