Luigi & Iango’s ‘Special Corps’ on display at Gnam in Rome

The exhibition presents a selection of over 100 photographs – including unpublished works and iconic images – in the first exhibition of Luigi & Iango who develops a reflection on the body as a place of identity, transformation and symbolic construction of the present. The shots, dedicated to personalities of contemporary culture, performers, dancers and international icons, compose a human atlas capable of reflecting the tensions and metamorphoses of our time. The works of Luigi & Iango, selected for this exhibition by Francesca Alfano Miglietti – among the most authoritative voices regarding the themes of transformation of the body and its contemporary modifications – go beyond the codes of fashion photography to open up to a broader dimension, in which the portrait takes on a poetic and political value. Fragmented bodies, suspended between vulnerability and monumentality that cross the exhibition space in a dramaturgy of lights and shadows that questions the relationship between vision, desire and authenticity. The duo’s visual research moves in a border territory where photography goes beyond simple representation and becomes a critical tool capable of investigating the condition of the contemporary body, developing images that question the mechanisms of visibility and identity construction.

As Francesca Alfano Miglietti underlines: “At the center of their work emerges a reflection on the body as a political, poetic and symbolic space. In their photographs there is no stable or definitive identity: the human figure appears rather as matter in transformation, an organism crossed by cultural tensions, desires, vulnerabilities and processes of redefinition of the self”. And he continues: “The legacy of performative practices, post-identity theories and cultural transformations that marked the second half of the twentieth century silently passes through these images. Luigi & Iango absorb these complexities in a visual grammar made of fragments, suspensions and disorganicities, where the portrait becomes a place of revelation and at the same time of restlessness”.

As Moreno Zani, founder of Tenderstories, declares: “The exhibition is designed starting from a reflection on the need for a poetic escape away from spectacularity, a reflection that becomes research on the dimension of a body, the human one, which becomes a thermometer of contemporary time, in which identity is a choice and a possibility, together with the narrative one, characterizes the entire exhibition”.

And again: “The appropriation of different languages – both specifically artistic and social in a broader sense – causes the margins of the various codes to collide, leading to unexpected outcomes. Thus, in the exhibition, a complex dramaturgy rich in references to various sources is organised. At times the recovery of the tradition of reportage seems indispensable, at other times the reference to a poignant and melancholy poeticity, or to the language of compassion. The characteristic of all the works is the absolute centrality of the dialogue with reality, since each work recovers life materials”. On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalog will be published containing reproductions of all the works on display, an essay by Francesca Alfano Miglietti, a conversation between the curator and the artists and further in-depth texts.