On Saturday 26 September 2020 at 4 pm, Vanishing, an exhibition featuring over 50 Polaroid photographs by Luigi Vigliotti, opens at Studio Cenacchi in the heart of Bologna. Curated by Jacopo Cenacchi, with a critical text by essayist Fausto Raschiatore, the exhibition runs until 24 October 2020.

Starting from analogue photographs taken during journeys across every continent, Luigi Vigliotti — born in Abruzzo and now based in Emilia-Romagna — creates Polaroid works on watercolour paper, wood and metal through image-transfer and emulsion-lift processes, combined with scratching techniques reminiscent of graffiti and Action Painting (vanishing images).

“Drawing on his passion for miniatures, antique engravings and graphic art, Vigliotti has found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in experimenting with Polaroid materials, exploring unconventional approaches to the language of photography.

The disappearance of the Polaroid brand (vanishing film) lends these images an additional, poignant note. […]

Through his reworking of his analogue archive, Vigliotti has developed an expressive practice with a strong cultural dimension. It allows viewers to experience — and the artist to revisit — moments, behaviours and significant experiences within a practice that moves between the descriptive and the conceptual. It offers the possibility of hearing voices, discovering stories, encountering particular realities and entering the atmospheres of peoples and cultures that are now disappearing or have already been forgotten (vanishing cultures). All this unfolds across different visual and narrative registers.”

From the critical text by Fausto Raschiatore