SCATTI # 14 LUCA MASSARO

LA TENDENZA

Please introduce yourself…

Hi, my name is Luca Massaro, I’m an artist and photographer; I run a studio in Milano called Gluqbar.

How would you describe your relationship with Milan? 

Casa, it’s my home.

What has this city granted/taught you? 

When I was 19 years old I moved to Milan to study, and started working at Pig Magazine: I learned a lot from older people that I was working and hanging out with in that field. I’m grateful they gave me the opportunity to grow both professionally and personally. 

Why the choice of title “La Tendenza” (“the trend” in English)?

The work started as a monographic commission on the architecture of Aldo Rossi, and the title refers to a group known as "La Tendenza" (also an exhibition of the same name at the Centre Pompidou, devoted to Italian architecture between' 65 and '85). Some photos have been published in various magazines, while others have remained in my head like refrains which I wanted to evolve into an installation context. The words "La Tendenza" at the entrance to the exhibition communicate with the images, interlinking the title of the exhibition and the name of the architectural group in a kind of amphibology, whose interpretation is left to the viewer. The ambiguity of the typically Italian word is both the starting point and the meeting point between the commission and the installation, between historical avant-garde and fleeting trends, and between past and future perfect.

What does “La Tendenza” narrate? Who are the principal protagonists/subject matters of "La Tendenza"?

For me, here the architecture relates to the encounter between the microcosm of the human scale and the geographic and temporal macrocosm; the number and choice of subjects do not pretend to academic completeness; the people that appear in the images are archetypical and anonymous. I'm not interested in a simple narration or storytelling: The images are mute. Instead, my research focuses on the invisible space that separates a photograph from the caption, the production of images from their consumption, in the various forms of translation and transmission.

How would you define “photography” and “photographing” nowadays? 

Today photography is easy and omnipresent, almost a primary need, like drinking or talking; it’s today's Esperanto, the universal language of our time. 

What is your motto in life? 

I don’t have a motto. 

If you could change one thing in the city what would it be? 

A deeper collaboration between young artists and institutions, art and design, between different generations and fields of work.

“La Tendenza" juxtaposes three different times and three photographic formats, responding to the space in which it is presented: The duration of the architecture, the pre-vision of trends, the instantaneousness of photography. Can you please tell me a little bit more about this photographic documentation? 

I do not believe in the possibility of pure documentation, and I’m not interested in the so-called “decisive moment”. I am more interested in the life of an image and its relation to a caption. In this case, I intended to communicate how architecture is slow, trends are fast, and photography is a frozen moment. The "La Tendenza" installation focuses precisely on these different spans of time and on the time of the photographic image itself.

The doubling of the decisive moment, the relationship between the archetypes of the past and their photographic documentation, the antithesis between the title and the images, between the time of architecture and the time of photography, between “the art of time and the memory of space”.

If you could choose one contemporary soundtrack to define your experience of the Milanese city which would it be? 

“Chanel” by Frank Ocean or “Milano” by Lucio Dalla. 

Tell me one (secret) thing that most people don’t know about Milan?

Gluqbar makes private parties.