Ergo Sum
Made in Europe and Argentina in six years, Valerio Polici’s photographic project Ergo Sum shows writers’ underground city. Polici perspective underlines the connections between the urban substratum and the artists, for whom he emphasises their creative potential and their expressive needs, elements which come alive during the night, at the streets’ side.
Following some of these protagonists, so called ‘adventuring companions’, the artist photographs in black and white suburban and forbidden places within a metropolitan and industrial setting, ‘in which definite identities lose themselves and give way to infinite possibilities’, in which the experience itself, as Chiara Pirozzi states, creates an opportunity of cultural and social, unknown and unexpected relationships.
Even though Polici is physically behind the camera and he is a witness of the events, his personal emotional involvement indelibly affects his work, which portrays the rush of the moment and the unpredictability of its epilogue. The photographer talks about sudden escapes, caused by the unforeseen alarm sound, and long waits he spends hidden among the other street artists, in the attempt not to be caught by the vigilance. Indeed, all this can be perceived from the rapidity of an unstable focus.
The movement of that journey in ‘the intestinal spaces of the metropolis’ is further highlighted by the artist throughout a video on display. It shares similarities with surveillance cameras and runs on a loop the wandering ways of the writers. Polici, therefore, becomes the protagonist and appearance of a subordinated universe, which the Galleria del Cembalo provides a physical place to be discovered and seen.
