Workshop with Vincenzo Castella I Dolomites
Workshops , Italy, Belluno, 29 August 2014
PROJECT
During the day’s workshop we will devote to the photographic observation of the Dolomiti territory, of its
forms and history. Identity, document, traces sedimentation. Meditations about the cultural concept of nature
and landscape, genius loci, marks of anthropization of the places. The organisation of the photographic storytelling
(preparation of the shot, the selection of the point of view and the framing, considerations about the
process, time and method…). Identity and vision: comment of urban and natural pictures. Clash-Experience-
Progress like figuration of the drift of photography as main language of reference.

TEACHER
Vincenzo Castella was born in Naples (1952) and currently lives in Milan.
He began his activity as a phographer in 1975; between 1975 and 1982 he concluded Geografia Privata (Private
Geography), color photos of domestic interiors. In 1976, 1978 and 1980 he is in the United States, where he
carried out the Hammie Nixon’s People project: a semi-immaginary biography of some bluesmen, dedicated
to the Afro-American, their lives and the Southern-American cities architecture (photos and 16mm film).
Since 1980, he exposes his works in Europe and in the United States.
In 1984 he took part with Barbieri, Basilico, Chiaramonte, Cresci, Guidi, Jodice and others in the noted Viaggio
in Italia curated by Luigi Ghirri, Gianni Leone, Enzo Velati, which led to the rediscovery and reinterpretation
of the italian landscape.
In 1998 he started the series of photos taken from the buildings of European cities. His photographies appear
to be increasingly a-narrative: he developed actual hypotheses of visual crossover on the complexity of the
tangle and “weave” of the cities, by producing large color prints from large and ultra large format film. This
research dwells on the topics of distance and dislocation. Images of Italian and European cities that belong
to this line of research are the ones of Naples, Milan, Turin, Rouen, Caen, Le Havre, Helsinki and Berlin, as
well as the images of other regions and sites such as Ramallah and Jerusalem.
From 2006 Castella realizes installations out of large-format photographic negatives: it is the case of Cronache
da Milano (Chronicles from Milan), work presented at Art Unlimited – Basel 2009, where the movements
of a virtual camera render an articulated reading of the photo itself and of the relations in the life of the city,
with what is visible and what is not.
Away from any form of style evolution, his work is tied instead to the systematic reduction of the repertoire
and to the synthesis of the language.

LOCATION
The place of our choice for this workshop is Borca di Cadore, a few steps from Cortina d’Ampezzo (13km), in
the Village Corte delle Dolomiti, which rises between the Monte Antelao and the Majestic proportion of the
Monte Pelmo, at about 1000-1200 metres in height. The region of Borca di Cadore is a mountain landscape
with spectacular nature, less known are the mountains of the neighbouring “Perla delle Doloniti”, but as
much, also more, amazing as landscapes and on which we should like to accomplish a photographic research
deepens.
The territory of the Dolomiti became in 2009 Unesco cultural heritage. The touristic Village of Corte took
shape in the fifties-sixties of Enrico Mattei will, charismatic and volcanic president of ENI. Destined to an
solida resort for the staff of the firm, it assumed a shape at the same time as a project precursor of the environmentalist
sensibility emerged in a more evident manner in the eighties and as expression of architectural
conception innovative able to annul “every link between aesthetics and social distinction”.
Projected by the istrian architect Edoardo Gellner in collaboration with Carlo Scarpa, it suffered a strong decline
further to the murder of Enrico Mattei and was again few years ago by an italian entrepeneur, with the
precise will to maintain and safeguard the original project.
The workshop will be held in the conference-hall of the Hotel Boite, which is part of the project as above. The
Hotel Boite is a place covered with charm and history, maintains untouched great amout of Gellner’s original
project and is situated in the most pure dolomitic landscape.
www.cortedelledolomitiresort.it/vacanze-a-cortina-d-ampezzo

CONTATTI
Giorgia Sarra +39 347 978 0123 I landscape.stories.workshop@gmail.com
www.landscapestories.net

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