Italy

Chiara Rame

www.chiararame.com

Biography

Born in 1982, Chiara Rame studied photography during college. After earning a degree in Foreign Literature and Foreign Languages at Università Statale di Milano, she attended the Professional School of Photography CFP Bauer, Milan, in 2008. She specialised in Photographic Contemporary Project in 2009. Chiara took part in various photography festivals in and around Europe such as the International Festival of Photography Fotosintesi (Piacenza, April 2010), Emergentes dst International Festival (Braga, September 2010), “Little Big Press”, in the frame of Fotoleggendo Festival (Rome; October 2010), the Boutographies Rencontres Photographiques de Montpellier (Montpellier, May 2011), Alessandria Photo Biennal (Alessandria; March 2011), the International Meetings of Photography 2011 (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), the Photography Festival Confini10 2013 and the Fotografia Europea International Photography Festival (Reggio Emilia, 2013). Chiara lives and works in Milan.

"The work by Chiara Rame entitled Spiazzati (Unsettled) portrays something minimal: a few small piles of soil photographed on a white background, like ready-made traits of nature. They form a short sequence which, in its own way, is mysterious in its radical simplicity. The soil has been taken from various points of the area in which Expo is being built. The title chosen by the photographer, Spiazzati, or ‘Unsettled’, refers to the sentiment of alienation and displacement aroused by the public works underway in preparation for the major international economic event, which are changing the face of the Milanese area. Chiara Rame does not, however, react to this sentiment in a traditional way - portraying the land dominated by construction sites in such a way as to emphasise transformation and contradiction, read its new signs and analyse its emerging identity. The response here to the disturbance is, rather, of an ancestral nature – reaching out to the earth (which we can no longer touch), taking it in our hands, as in a gesture of reappropriation, of returning to our roots, and then, once it has been removed from its context, looking at it, making it the object of attention and analysing it through the camera." Roberta Valtorta, scientific director of Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan.

“The idea for Glue came about when the photographer discovered an old factory register. Inside, the unknown owner had stuck pictures from newspapers, magazines, greetings cards, labels, etc. all meticulously cut out and in chronological order, from the 1950s to the 1970s. From this strange repertory Chiara Rame extracts clues and traces of a distant past, just visible through the successive stages of photography and printing, but heavy with resonance. In the study of time through these images one observes something of the mysterious memory of photography. The multiplicity of successive choices which have filtered these images just until now - photographing, developing, paste-up, printing, cutting out, selective re-photographing - have in some way distilled an essence of sensations which have permitted them to last, to densify and to be imbued by all the attention that has been accorded to them. These photographs have 'meaning': they are the sum of a troubled or emotional scrutiny that they themselves have generated. In them resides something of our strange and inexplicable need for images." Christian Maccotta, artistic director of Les Boutographies Rencontres Photographiques de Montpellier

In 2006 I started collecting toys left behind by children by simply walking around the city.
I’ve always been fascinated with how children have a strong sense of ownership because toys provide emotional security but at the same time all at once they simply forget about them. I take the objects as they are, with all the traces of their past and I scan them and archive them precisely.
I also decided to retell new stories and give new meanings to these objects by creating a dummy book, an ABC booklet.