Explosion!!!

For Andrea Botto photographing explosions has been an ongoing focus since 2008. It is both stimulating and fructifying to present these works in the programme of an art space for contemporary photography. Botto’s work offers a kind of culmination point in which many of photography’s key functions and strengths converge: What we are presented with is landscape photography, a classic subject of the medium. Botto’s works show photographic technology at its essence, in the capturing of an unreproducible moment that would otherwise elude our perception. And, of course, his photos are also documentations, the visual recording of the historical events a community of individuals would like to remember for generations.

© Andrea Botto, KA-BOOM #67, Ponte Morandi, Genova 2019

Upon closer inspection of the photos, however, we immediately realise that they are not being witnessed from a distance. The landscape becomes the photo studio and the staged subject at once, and the artist’s work reflects the processes of both change and dissolution. In conjunction with the INN SITU series, the artist was invited to continue his work series in the Tyrol/Vorarlberg region. Among other things, a series of new works with avalanche experts in the field and an examination of the Tirol Panorama in Innsbruck with its more than 1,000 m² cyclorama of the third Battle of Bergisel in 1809 were created.

© Andrea Botto, Silvretta Montafon 04 2022

Andrea Botto

(*1973 in Rapallo, Liguria) studied photography at the IED – Istituto Europeo di Design in Turin. His projects have been acknowledged by grants and awards and have been exhibited in international museums, including the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (2005), the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2005), the SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne (2006), the MAXXI Museum in Rome (2007/2016/2021), the Fundación Canal in Madrid (2007), the MoCA in Shanghai (2010), the Villa Croce in Genoa and the Benaki Museum in Athens (2015). Along with his artistic research, Botto gives lectures and educational workshops, and he has been in charge of several cultural projects. He is currently professor of Documentary Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, and he is one of the founding members of the art collective Fotoromanzo Italiano.

His works are to be found in private and public collections, including the Bibliothéque Nationale de France in Paris, the MAXXI in Rome, the MuFoCo in Milan, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the FMAV in Modena and the GAM in Turin. His publications include the highly acclaimed “19.06_26.08.1945” (Danilo Montanari, Ravenna 2014), which won third prize in the Kassel Dummy Award competition at the Fotobookfestival (Kassel) and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook Award; “KA-BOOM The Explosion of Landscape” (Èditions Bessard, Paris 2017), a fictional blasting manual, shortlisted for the Photo Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles; “Reviviscence. A Bridge Over Genoa” (Rizzoli, New York 2020), about the demolition and construction site following the collapse of the Morandi Bridge.