Curated by MEGA and Nicola Ricciardi

At the time of the thirteenth edition of the Isola delle Storie Literature Festival, theartistsDiego Perrone and Andrea Sala come together once again in a discipline far from their work as sculptors, which is to say photography, in the etymological sense of the word as "writing with light". 

This cooperation is proposed by theMAN for the first time in the rooms of Gavoi's Municipal Museum. Its original formulation in April of2016 was with an exhibition at the MEGA in Milan (Unghia, curated by MEGA [Davide Giannella, Delfino Sisto Legnani and Giovanna Silva] and Nicola Ricciardi). At that time,Perrone and Sala exhibited a series of works produced inside homemade darkrooms set up in cellars, spaces found here and there and in unused rooms. A year in these homey and transitory spaces made the two artists skilled in the chemical processes involved in developing photographs and in drawing freehand on photosensitive supports, using as a brush a small source of electric light, it too made manually. The resulting works, characterized by a plastic, almost sculptural materiality, represent forms that are abstract only in appearance. They allude to some of the basic assumptions of their research: blind observation of technique, engraving as the primordial writing instrument, error as a category of experience (from which comes the recurring bumper icon). 

While the first part is characterized by working closely with the photographerDelfino Sisto Legnani, who produced the shots from which derive the later drawings, in this second part the artists decided to come to grips and interact with the protagonists of the festival. In fact, from the time of the appointment in Milan, the cooperation between Perrone and Sala assumed the force and traction to open up to continuous experimentation in terms of formats, contexts, approaches and participations. For theIsola delle Storie, the well-tested technique of "writing with light" as a method both practical and theoretical, is made available to the writers who are invited to enter a darkroom designed and built specifically for the spaces of the Municipal Museum; here they will be called upon to write sentences, thoughts and considerations with no fixed subject, letting themselves be guided by the precarious balance between photographic processes and typographical printing. The pages of photosensitive film - hybrid objects of sculpture, photography and literature - will live as independent and, at the same time, collective works of art and will be exhibited during the festival together with the works originally presented in Milan. “Atleta Frottage” does not simply represent the second chapter of Unghia, but rather its narrative development, the evolution of an investigation into the connection between technique and language, which in this new context becomes more explicitely an exploration of the relationship between the word and its physical representation.