Paradise Discotheque
english / italiano
photography | archival print/Hahnemuhle Paper | 2015/2021
variable sizes / ed. 5 + 2 a.p.
Paradise Discotheque, Third Place at Sony World Photography Awards 2015 Professional Competition / Architecture Category
Once upon a time there was a country that danced to disco and house rhythms on one side, and to those of liscio (traditional Italian ballroom music) on the other. Irreconcilable worlds that never met, even though physically they could be just a few kilometres apart (and in more than one case a few centimetres apart, when parents and children found themselves under the same roof the morning after, divided by a bubble of legitimate incomprehension, recently bridged for a few minutes by the remix version of “Far l'amore”).
The former seemed to belong entirely to the present and imagined it also embodied the future; the latter seemed to represent a dying past, the memory of a time gone by.
Then, almost without anyone noticing, everything (or almost) changed: the temples of disco fell into disuse and became ruins, evidence of a recent past forgotten too quickly – like everything in the age of the internet – while the posters of the stars and starlets of liscio still cover the walls of the same streets that welcomed them thirty years ago.
It is easy, today, to claim that the former were buildings constructed without foundations, plants without roots, while the latter represented the healthy popular soul of the country, well rooted in the territory, and from these considerations to launch into cloying barroom sociologisms, with inevitable references to the difference between mass culture and popular culture (perhaps forgetting the abyss between the disco culture of the Eighties and the house culture of the Nineties, paying attention to the places of worship and not to the rites).
In reality, the big discotheques were clearly places intended for the immediate use of one generation, two at most, built in full knowledge that they would disappear as generations and fashions changed, consumer goods among thousands of others in one of the richest provinces of the West. Like the tracks played inside them, they were tied to a precise moment, truly part of a spirit of the time, like the shopping centres and the large amusement parks that were born in the same period, certainly not by chance. (...)
(..) La Grotta systematically tackles a fairly broad geographical area (northern Italy), sampling some particularly significant cases from an architectural or social point of view, concentrating on a well-defined period of construction (only the Woodpecker had already been built in the Sixties) and on equally well-defined architectural types, using a rigorous documentary style that deliberately detaches the author from the subject, placing the author in the neutral condition of a witness. Ruins they are, of course, but La Grotta does not want to give in to the romantic taste for depicting the transience of worldly things; they are kitsch horrors of an architecture without quality, not even redeemed by some Venturi and Brown of the twenty-first century, without doubt, but on this point too La Grotta avoids venturing into broader analyses, which would require other approaches to be credible. La Grotta claims for photography the ability to bring to light what – for various reasons – is not seen, is not before everyone's eyes, what is hidden or forgotten, and which nevertheless has an essential characteristic: the possibility of giving life to a narrative in images capable of arousing curiosity, of suggesting a beyond of the image, worthy of being known. The image exhausts the forms within itself, but leaves interpretations open, just as the photographer leaves the visual field around the buildings open, nonetheless letting a part of the context in which they are immersed emerge, suggesting a further space, to be investigated or imagined according to the viewer's wishes. (...)
from Remix by Walter Guadagnini
> Fuori i moralisti dalle discoteche di Marco Mancassola .Internazionale