Die andere Seite - Massimiliano Tommaso Rezza + Bookshop Stock

“Die andere Seite,” the fifth project room by Massimiliano Tommaso Rezza


“Die andere Seite” is a project focused on the collection and accumulation of images rescued from the Internet, and selected not in terms of a pre-established logic but rather with a desire to deconstruct the rules of fotogenia. Following the concept of "frame," the artist extracts images from their contexts of production to question the way in which they have been documented. In most cases, this develops a series of frames through which Rezza interrogates the photographic medium, preferring an open and indefinite form to that of the narrative. Within this archive, consisting of more than 1500 images, there are around 30 frames taken by personal videos of Eva Braun revealing private moments of Adolf Hitler's life. These images, however, thanks to the absorption of the magmatic flow of the archive, lose their disturbing character. The Führer, in fact, being not immediately recognizable, becomes only a human figure among many others. “All this work is a translation of a dreamlike, or hallucinating experience, in which images seem to have the same quality or nature; without distinction as to their provenance. Hitler’s photographs are a Trojan Horse dragged inside the walls of our city.” Thus the artist summarises the nature of the archive – with a title that alludes to Alfred Kubin’s novel published in 1908 – as a liquid image of the passage between dream and reality, from a rational dimension to another one purely sensitive. Exhibited inside the gallery’s space are a series of object-books that enclose the complexity of the archive even if they never offer a single overall view, together with some large "Fine Art" prints that investigate the ambiguous nature of the web fragment.