Cuba, un Popolo … | Mestre

CUBA Un Popolo Una Nazione / One People One Nation

February 9 - March 16 2008 | photography | Candiani, Mestre

Curated by Alberto Zanchetta

Catalog with texts by Roberto Ellero, Alberto Zanchetta

Andrea Morucchio’s solo exhibition Cuba. Un popolo, una nazione (Cuba. A People, a Nation), presented in 2008 at the Centro Culturale Candiani in Mestre, marked a milestone both in the artist’s trajectory and in the history of the institution. Produced by the Municipality of Venice and inaugurated by Mayor Massimo Cacciari, the exhibition was among the most visited in the Candiani’s history and one of the most ambitious solo projects ever realized there—featuring more than eighty printed and framed works occupying the centre’s principal exhibition space.

Drawing on a body of photographic work created in Cuba in the late 1990s, during the delicate post-Periodo Especial years, Morucchio offered an acute and empathic portrayal of the island’s social and cultural landscape. His images reveal “the pure and simple joy of the children, the routine of work, the serenity of the people, the calm of daily life,” as critic Alberto Zanchetta observed, noting how the artist “avoids falling into stereotypes” and “eschews aesthetic traps.”

Zanchetta situates Morucchio’s practice within a wider reflection on the photographic act as both myth and technology: “the photographic image—an omnivorous mytho/techno-logical process—is located at the apex of the Cyclopic eye.” In Morucchio’s work, photography is “much more than a simple means of communication. It is an experiential practice,” a form of “transmission-relation with respect to the world.” This perspective reveals a “participatory gaze” that refuses detachment, seeking instead “a face-to-face dialogue—no matter how voiceless—with that round eye… which gazes with famished curiosity and amused complicity.”

Through this “mobile and humble attitude,” as Zanchetta further notes, Morucchio achieves “a psycho-geographic postcard” of Cuba—one that traverses neighbourhoods, individuals, and situations to uncover “contradictions, dreams and hopes.” In doing so, his photography transcends the boundaries of reportage, embodying what might be called a phenomenology of encounter: a practice in which vision, empathy, and experience coalesce into an act of shared presence.