from March 8, 2017 to April 30, 2017
curated by Agata Polizzi
Archives as an intimate cataloguing tool, the journey as experience of the world, and memory as a mark to be represented. People met, places, sensations or perceptions are an occasion for an excavation into the archeology of the past experiences that belongs to us, images as minimal elements of a narrative.
Cécile Hummel (Gottlieben 1962) follows a precise methodology. Hers is a process that builds up and re-elaborates visions. Drawing and photography are the forms of her representation. The undertow, instead, is a humanistic education that is nourished by the classical matrix of things, a gaze that always involves an awareness that everything has a “history” to be circumscribed within an experience.
La mémoire du temps dans l`espace is a sort of dossier that talks about the identity of a contemporary Mediterranean that embodies the memory of the past and the contradictions and complexity of a living system in the present. In her works, Hummel reinterprets traces that are nothing more than everyday life: recycled objects, architectures, animals, glimpses, gardens and significant elements of how humans perceive and are affected by time and space.
The selection of works for the project La mémoire du temps dans l`espace at Galleria Francesco Pantaleone consists of photographic works, drawings and installations and is the fruit of a number of trips to Italy, Egypt and Morocco, a train of glimpses of cities and of experiences of everyday life in their apparent normality. In particular, Sicily is revisited through small details that magnify, replicate and arrange images as pieces in a puzzle. These are the large or small definitions of worlds in which everything has a precise meaning. Indeed, archives and identities retrieved from a faded past that survive in the present become entwined with scenes of real life and become otherness.
Cécile Hummel’s works are clearly metaphysical; certain glimpses escape precise classification and are representations of the world: some objects are real, but they lose their connotations and end up becoming abstract. The photographic works collect ornaments, finds, and landscapes that Hummel reconstructs as if they were documents to show, study and scrutinize. The drawings contribute to reflection; they are pauses to think; they describe precise forms that are replicated and remain suspended between what is real and what is three-dimensional. They are yet a further comment, indeed notes. They are certainly a source of insights.
This systematic and not necessarily orderly effort, the sentimental documentation of a beauty perceived in its distinctive mark, and the romantic attempt to classify a culture whose roots delve into a common belonging for its most intimate meaning make Hummel’s works a collective version of what is her cognitive process, her ability to establish a bond with places and with their history and to perceive that part of truth that makes experience unique.
