Photography and visual impairment

The Cavazza Institute was involved in many ways at the latest edition (the 50^th) of Arte Fiera, held in Bologna from 2 to 4 February 2024. The Institute had a stand presenting its “Camera Chiara: photography and visual impairment” project, an experiment combining photography, art, and visual impairment based on a laboratory course conducted in 2023. In addition, a collaboration with Spazio b5 made it possible to organize a day dedicated to art for the students of the “Telephone operator” course.

The gallery hosted Mons Jorgensen’s exhibit “This Is Not A Fairytale” by the Dutch multidisciplinary artist based in London, making her Italian debut at Arte Fiera. Her large-scale paintings, black and white photos, short videos, sculptures and performances conquered the exhibition space and created a physical and metaphorical entrance to the “meta-world” with which Jorgensen investigates daily life, in depth but always with grace and delicacy. Moreover, two of her works were auctioned to raise funds for our Institute, with excellent results.

The works were:

- Merfish, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 2023.

A mermaid relaxes, hanging upside-down in the ocean, in cloudy-green water with green bubbles that rise around her. Her hands are behind her head, her hair moving with the ocean current. If you look closer, you see that she is upside-down because her tail is tied to a rope. (A mermaid is a creature that resembles a woman from the shoulders up and a fish from the shoulders down. No one knows how they reproduce.)

- Schembart Miro, photograph, 2018.

This photograph, in multiple shades of green, is a double exposure of the pond near the Victoria Miro Gallery in London and of the artist masked as a Schembart figure (Schembart translates as “beardmask”). The Schembart carnival was an old German tradition in which men wore bearded masks and mocked the people in power in their town. This female Schembart is doubly subversive, playing with tradition, the legend of the beard, and placing herself in a pond, evoking ancient ideas of water as the source of natural power.

So that the students could best experience Mons Jorgensen’s works, the Institute produced an accessible document with the artist’s introduction to her works and a description of her paintings and photos in Braille. These instruments, along with the Gallery’s collaboration, allowed the students to attend a tactile and narrative experiential laboratory. A wonderful afternoon of thought and laughter. The works provided an opportunity to consider the artist’s ideas and concepts and, in general, our students’ relationship with art.

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