Pietraia is the result of the encounter between sculptor Giulia Cenci and photographer Jacopo Benassi—their practices merging to create a new body of work, where the hybrid forms of her pieces and his visceral gaze generate a shared language of transformation.
Introduced by curator Antonio Grulli, the artists met in Milan and then gathered in Pietraia, a rural village where Cenci set up her studio in the former stables of her family's farm. There, she works with metal to create casts of organic and mechanical bodies—branches and pipes, bones and pistons, human and animal faces—which she assembles and disassembles to shape new, visionary figures.
Benassi photographed these creations indoors, in the studio, and outdoors, in the woods. Rejecting conventional modes of documentation, he worked in darkness, using flash and long exposures, fragmenting and multiplying the shapes, turning heavy metal into trails of pure light. Rearranging Cenci's works into unexpected constellations—relating and contrasting with each other and with the surrounding vegetation—his shots reveal their spectral nature and amplify their phantasmatic presence.
"A cast is a photographic process, albeit a three-dimensional one"—writes Grulli. At the same time, using the blinding flash of his camera, Benassi sets out to "re-sculpt" Cenci's figures. Pietraia thus becomes the outcome of a collaboration where two distinct practices fuse, giving rise to something entirely new—an uncanny language of light and matter, haunted and alive.
Jacopo Benassi (born 1970, lives and works in La Spezia, Italy) is one of the most prolific and talented Italian photographers. His work has the camera at its centre but he touches on languages such as performance, video, curating, and sound. He has collaborated for many years with the director Paolo Sorrentino, and has developped many projects with
Federico Pepe. He has worked with some of the most legendary international musicians of the international punk and post-punk scene. During his career he has worked, among the others, for
Rolling Stone,
Purple Magazine,
GQ,
Vice,
Wired,
ICON Panorama,
Riders, just to name a few.
Giulia Cenci, born 1988 in Cortona, Italy, lives between Amsterdam and Tuscany. Time, transience, and alteration are at the heart of the artist's sculptural research, which is based on fragments of everyday objects taken out of their environment.
