curated by Ilaria Campioli
Palazzo dei Musei, Reggio Emilia

Zone di passaggio offers a reflection on darkness with the aim of narrating the significant value it holds in the collective imagination. The starting point is the numerous nocturnal settings created by Luigi Ghirri throughout his career. These are places "temporarily illuminated, or spaces that live in their discreet semidarkness and only temporarily become festively bright," activating an alternative reading of reality. For Ghirri, it is the glimmers, flashes, and small intermittences like those of fireflies that express the best modes of illumination because they maintain the perception of darkness, preserving its shadowy areas.

The exhibition, starting from the medium and visibility experiments of the late 1960s, carried out by Franco Guerzoni together with Luigi Ghirri and Franco Vaccari, thus presents the work of important authors whose works offer "micro-ruptures," generated by sudden illuminations capable of revealing the hidden relationship between light and darkness in nature. In his famous 1923 intervention titled "The Ritual of the Serpent," Aby Warburg states that "the lightning trapped in the wire – captured electricity – has produced a civilization that cleanses paganism" and, in a sense, the sacredness that binds man to nature. This fear actually finds a new horizon of understanding in the works of Mario Airò, Gregory Crewdson, Paola De Pietri, Paola Di Bello, Stefano Graziani, Armin Linke, Amedeo Martegani, and Awoiska Van Der Molen. The different projects evoke, in various ways, the space of possibility offered by darkness, where glimmers, apertures, and illuminations allow for new configurations.