Luca Massaro (b. Reggio Emilia, 1991) currently lives in Milan. He’s founder of LDS Editions & Gallery, experimental platforms for publishing and exhibition corollaries at the intersection of URL and IRL.
His first monograph “Foto Grafia†(winner of Nascimben Prize U25 2014) was published in 2015 by Danilo Montanari Editore, presented internationally and exhibited at F4 Festival, Matèria Gallery,Fondazione Benetton.
Vietnik is a musical pseudonym: a photographic biopic of this persona retraces his story through new images (taken in the plotted spots of the faulty map that brought him to New York) and original material from the archives of Robert Frank, Arthur Russell, Bob Dylan, Luigi Ghirri. Vietnik is a score producing “an ambience, defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint†that here connects the sequence of heterogeneous images. Vietnik music is haunting every picture and viceversa in a multimedia and multiplatform collaboration: a partition producing a performance and completed by the reader execution.
Music becomes a soundtrack, clothes a costume, biographies biopics. Vietnik is a personal musical where, just like in contemporary Hollywood biopic factory, the audience is the protagonist.
Vietnik is among the winners of Giovani Artisti Italiani 2016, and will be on view at Palazzo Casotti, Fotografia Europea, in a collective exhibition curated by Daniele De Luigi, opening May 6th in Reggio Emilia. The installation is composed of digital inkjet prints, original documents and duratrans prints mounted in lightboxes. This lightbox series within the series titled “Retina†references the tradition of studio still-life on white background updated to our today fruition on backlit screen : the duratrans prints mounted in backlit white frame (similar to the commercial signage, modern devices or a computer screen) conceptually follow the fruition which influences the result.
“Vietnik†(2014-2016) is a new chapter of a trilogy (after “Foto Grafia†and “The Eagle & The Toadâ€) at the intersection of image and word, photobooks made-to-read “at the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopediaâ€, installations mixing medias and projects' distinctions, dealing with common themes such as translation, amphibology, dualism, biographic mythology.
