Beyond the Frame: Student Explorations in Photographic Rolls and Books

Beyond the Frame: Student Explorations in Photographic Rolls and Books offers a reflection on the infinite possibilities of contemporary photography within the academic context, embracing the expressive freedom of the medium within current visual research.
The exhibition presents a selection of projects created by RUFA students from the Photography programme over the past five years, highlighting the results achieved in the process of defining their own visual identity and exploring different forms of visual and narrative construction, with the aim of presenting a broad and diverse perspective on the students’ creative experiences.

“Beyond the Frame” celebrates research and the creative process understood as a journey made up of climbs, descents, accelerations and falls; it stages a dialogue between images and bodies and creates short circuits between different possible approaches, styles and perspectives found in books, rolls and on walls, with the aim of discovering new forms in relation to space and the viewing experience. The installation takes shape from the characteristics of the exhibition space, highlighting the importance of the relationships between images within a project. The display of the rolls also evokes the continuous and dynamic process of research work, the most archaic forms of the book and the need for contemporary photographic practice to find new ways of relating to the exhibition space and the viewing experience.

The exhibited projects reflect a rich variety of approaches to exploring the photographic medium: from the analysis of the possibilities of archiving and documentation by Michael Trutta, to the exploration of artificial intelligence and cyborg themes by Leonardo Valdivia Hurtado, to the personal research and narrative of Serena Radicioli, which incorporates archival material and different approaches to image-making, to Lucia Estevez’s experimentation with performativity and materials and Lucrezia Ceselin’s analysis of urgent environmental issues.

The exhibition also presents several interpretations of the book as an object, ranging from the most experimental to the apparently more conventional, all united by an attempt to establish a strong coherence between the nature of the project and the construction of the object.

Each volume, each composition of images on the roll, takes on its own independent form within the installation environment while remaining connected to the exhibition’s overall system, which unfolds through the interaction of the various perspectives and approaches to the photographic medium and to the space of the book.

Exhibition curated by Fiorenza Pinna, Michele Palazzi.
Coordinated by Serena Radicioli, Michael Trutta.
With the collaboration of Fonderia 20.9, technical partner of the event.