The French photographer Aurore Valade returns to Gagliardi e Domke for her fifth solo exhibition.

The exhibition project brings together some series of works created by Valade in recent times, which have at their center the theme of revolt, uprising or rather rising up. Everything, as always in Valade’s characteristic style, with a thread of irony, in a vortex of colored objects and details to be read, one by one, scanning the images with curiosity and attention.

The photographs on display have as their theme the feminist revolts, the Spanish indignados of a few years ago and a slightly more recent series, which studies birds and their ability to take flight overcoming the barriers that imprison us, be they social , psychological or dictated by necessity as in the recent lockdown.

The title chosen for this exhibition has an explicit reference to Georges Didi – Huberman, the great French philosopher and art historian, undoubtedly among the artist’s theoretical references. The reference is, in particular, to some texts not yet translated into Italian which bear the title of “Ce qui nous soulève” – literally “what lifts us up” – where Didi-Huberman investigates the theme of popular uprisings and revolts, as well as all the possible semantic declinations of the term “rise”, following the common thread of the Spartakist revolts in Germany in the 1920s, and above all the thoughts of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg.

But Aurore Valade’s images look at the theme of revolt in a non-trivial way, understanding revolutionary movements also in the sense of intimate, interior upheavals that affect us and change our lives. Literally, the objects of the demonstration in the square, the banners, signs, slogans and programmatic declarations, are therefore set up indoors, in the homes of the people who walked through the squares and who demonstrated in the squares. The revolt therefore changes direction, it takes place inside the houses, where its vestiges are memory, remains of lived experiences, but not only that. It is as if the revolt itself, which lives its essential collective and shared dimension in the square, subsequently moved inside, into the private experiences of individual people, into their stories and their lives, now taken individually.

What is it about? A cry that remains closed within the four walls of the home, as if everything that needed to be said hadn’t yet been said? A turn to the private, beyond the collective, a bit like in the eighties, in full television bulimia, but with much more impatience? Or, on the contrary, and more probably, is it the desire to make oneself heard, to manifest oneself, literally, for what one really is and deeply wants, which has not found – perhaps not yet – an adequate response? Or, again, why not, a revolt that becomes existential and touches us deeply, directing our path along new paths?

Here, then, the works on birds and their flight are added to the series on the theme of revolt, to which we feel emotionally similar and involved when we feel the urgency within ourselves to place ourselves beyond everything that limits and constrains: be they the chains of necessity, habit or prejudice. Leaving all these things behind us, we enter, therefore, into the riskiest, but fascinating realm of the possible. Thus, we learn to rise, and this time well beyond the limits of our apartment, with the wings of lightness and the rebellious and joyful feeling of a new, profound, finally achieved freedom.