Claudio Gobbi

PERSISTENCE (2002 – ONGOING)

Since 2002 my work has focused on the search for certain persistent features that can be seen as defining elements of a given cultural type. In the theatres, Japanese gardens or Armenian churches, my driving purpose is to find an image that represents evidence of a specific community, a symbol of belonging or the sign of a cultural boundary.
In this project the 20th Century theatre is seen as a location of shared memory, a form of perpetuation of an outdated but resistant collective identity. The images wish to suggest a possible geography for a cultural path through time and space, somewhere between documentary and fiction, where the furnishings, forms and colours of a past age are used to draw an imaginary frontier of the old continent.
Far from being a closed series, but open as my other projects to further developments, Persistence inquires the European territory through more than twenty countries, from Portugal to Russia, from France to Caucasus, territories that for their history and culture more than any others represents a natural bridge between East and West and raises open questions on our multiple cultural prospects.

Installation Views (Under Construction)