7 October 2013
A projection with the images of a thousand swastikas drawn on walls, a photographic collage of dozens of doodles of penises, posted up like a jumble of advertising posters. A series of foreign prostitutes pictured singing songs in their own languages, amidst the sounds of the Roman countryside and those of thousands of automobiles. Showcases containing dozens of clumsy notices forbidding the taking of photographs, crucifixes hung from rearview mirrors, shadows, road signs: Quinto Quarto is the title of the Rome Commission 2013, a section of Fotografia–Festival Internazionale di Roma, entrusted to the American Tim Davis. After The New Antiquity, a book that came out of a long period spent in Italy in which the Fine Arts and the city outskirts were mixed up in a gaze always turned on the insignificant and neglected, with Quinto Quarto (“fifth quarter,” the offal of butchered animals that was not sold but taken home by workers to eat) even the perception of the place has disappeared, leaving only scratches, faces, handwritten sheets of paper. No beauty in the Eternal City for Davis, just a heap of fragments that cannot be put back together.
Tim Davis. Quinto Quarto, Commissione Roma 2013
Fotografia – Festival Internazionale di Roma, MACRO
A cura di Marco Delogu
Roma
5 ottobre > 8 dicembre 2013
