The public and private sphere, the exteriority of social relationships and domestic interiority seem to have leveled their edges, their margins, blurring into one another. In this series of photographs taken inside the park-museum Swissminiatur, through the interplay of proportions and provocations, Vittoria Fragapane presents us with a project which, like a fabric, appears to be made up of various levels, of various folds. The first level we may identify – ‘first’ not of course in terms of importance – is that in which we have the photographic reproduction of works that, in turn, reproduce buildings, squares or – more in general – the public places of any town in Switzerland. Another fold then consists of the fact that this project is presented as a journey to a place which, reproducing other places, itself evokes the notion of the journey. The physicality of travel is evoked, in turn, by the choice of the analogical image. In the eyes of the artist, the material element of this seems to evoke an atmosphere of nostalgia akin to that which we sometimes feel when browsing through photo albums of our own past travels. What is strikingly disarming in her shots, first of all, is the lack of any distinguishability between what is big and what is small. In actual fact, most of these photographs seem to hold in a state of indistinction what our everyday experience of the world seems to have always taken for granted, i.e. our ability to identify the size of things in spatial terms. Thus they seem to invite us into a state of suspension.
The movement of distancing brings us closer; that
of coming closer distances us, yet it is the same process that produces such effects. And so we might say that this self-same ambiguity – to be considered as that which does not let itself be divided, as that which is placed between two opposites which are such only on the basis of this ‘between’ – seems to feed off Fragapane’s photographs: through the screen of the lens, the artist represents and at the same time distances the places and things portrayed.

Text by Matteo M. Paolucci