Alessandra Spranzi

The artistic research of Alessandra Spranzi (1962, Milan) is connected with photography, with photographic staging, the reuse of images of her own or taken by others, collage and "photographs of photographs." Her work reveals a taste for humble materials, everyday situations, domestic settings, neglected and obsolete objects, handwork and its gestures. Through these tools and these subjects, through appropriations and even minimal manipulations, Spranzi never stops questioning the mystery of existence and the fundamental forces that determine our fate, as well as that of the objects and spaces that surround us.

For Alessandra Spranzi, photography and video are, first and foremost, ways of seeing and of reimagining the world. Rather than privileging technique, her attention is directed toward the elementary gestures of the photographic act - looking, enlarging, reducing reproducing, reassembling - understood as actions through which the image is continuously analyzed, displaced, and rewritten. These processes generate bodies of works in which fragments, objects, and memories are staged, and in which the familiar is subtly unsettled by slippages and suspensions of meaning.

«Though she shows photographs, Alessandra Spranzi is not a photographer, but an artist who uses photography. This distinction might seem cavillous or even obsolete: it dates back to the 1970s and has gradually lost its aptness to describe the evolution of the photographic language. But in Spranzi's case it can be useful. Most of her works do not feature original images shot by Spranzi, but recycle images of others taken from practical manuals, science books, classified ads. They are photographs Spranzi has collected over the years, selected and then reutilized in a different way: rephotographing them, cutting, enlarging, printing with techniques that differ from those used to make the original image, or at times using them as the starting materials for a collage. What interests her is to point out a beauty that was already lurking, unseen in existing images: anonymous photographs, not made by professionals, or in any case made without artistic ends.» - Simone Menegoi