Percorrenze 2.0, curated by M. Bazzini, Serravalle Pistoiese, Pt

Family Album is a public archive in which, starting with this edition of the event local event Percorrenze 2.0, a collective memory of the town of Serravalle Pistoiese will be stored.

Photographs of weddings, first communions, the celebrations for the local patron saint’s day or the soccer team, but also home movies made on vacation, belonging to the memories of each single inhabitant of the town, find a new status in this work by the artist Stefano Boccalini: no longer linked to personal episodes, they become parts of a more complex process, namely the history of a town.

The title refers to the photo albums that narrate the life of families. But in the work the term family is no longer seen as a nucleus of persons connected by marriage or lineage; it is an extended family where ties are created by the sense of belonging to a community that dwells in a territory, the old medieval town.

Boccalini’s work is based on the natural concept of sharing of the simplest things in life, just as happens on an everyday level, in the life of a family. Precisely as happens here in what is considered one of the pillars of society, here too different families and all the inhabitants of the town are encouraged to enter into a new relationship of trust, a new awareness of their responsibilities to each other. The act of donating their personal memories to the archive, even the most dearly cherished, implies a renewed commitment with respect to the community as a whole.
(Marco Bazzini)