Back - Press Release To the one who is not her by Fabiola Naldi When time seems to flow too fast, when what we live is so intense that we want to stop it, photographs can give us the chance to stop time. From its invention photography has succeded in giving us the opportunity to revive images of the past: memories, feelings and places that we will never see again and which will remain on film as a testimony of our presence. The eye can see, the memory can retain and the camera can record. Every bidimensional reproduction is the outcome of moments in space and time, which are translated by the photographic lense. Every photo is a stolen reality, the fragment of a private diary and a note of life, which is trasformed in a living moment as an alternative to the real experience. Our travel notes - even in fantastic or intimate travel - are made of the same substance as photographs. Whatever use we are prepared to do of an image, a shard of the desire to taste the moment will remain to be eventually shared with others. When the opportunity to use technology such as Internet and e-mail, reduces time, we can access instantly to the photographic diary, and the outcome of such experience may become art. Stefano Cagol has been working on photography for a long time. In his work visions of reality are captured by special techniques and digital modifications or visual manipulations of empty images. Y2kTwo Miami Beach Diary Project is the result of an artistic travel that Stefano started several years ago and the second part of the Y2kOne Diary Project. The last performance was a sequence of photographs, fragments of everyday life and travelling notes that Stefano was sending every two days while visiting New York last spring 2001. The second episode of Stefano Cagol’s visual work in progress is now taking place at the Art Basel Miami Beach 2002 in collaboration with the Artcore Gallery of Toronto. His aim is to wave reality with the artist's imagination and generate a new creative itinerary. Stefano Cagol will interact with whoever would like to be a witness of his experience through his website at http://www.y2ktwo.com where photographs, video and texts will be published during the five days of his stay in Miami. The performance will give the opportunity to create a virtual connection between the participants to the event, who will see but may not pay attention, and those not present but are nevertheless ‘peeping’ at the website. The media will also give the chance to the public to participate to the social context of the art exhibition and to its stimulating environment, and have a look at sunny Florida beaches. In his work Stefano Cagol expresses an urgency to subvert his own values, making accessible to the others the more private and intimate meanings of his diary. His idea is to consider photography and the artist as witnesses of a presence. His intention while performing as an artist is to give meaning to the medium and to construct a twofold process: the amplification of ‘being in face of things’ and the total immersion in reality (which makes authentic every image, despite of its unreality). Stefano Cagol's photographs communicate an ephemeral and flexible perspective where the relation between the aesthetic satisfaction and the real time of its occurrence is managed by the strict timing of the artist's actions. The second part of Stefano Cagol’s project in particular, underlines a specific goal of the work of this artist: the coexistence of experiences and their efficacy. Time inside his hints of photographs is the sum of different times, repeated, mixed and prolonged over past and present. The transition and the speed of internet abolish a fixed time so that Stefano Cagol - and together with him the virtual visitors of the website - can be at the same time the operator and the observer of a performance without time, national or cultural boundaries. Looking at his work we realize that we are all witness in front of the world: photographs in this sense capture the reality embedding it into a virtual web where ‘we can posses images and are at the same their possession, but are never owners of reality (S.Sontag). Back - Press Release