friday 25 + saturday 26 june
Jacopo Benassi
Hunt me down
Hunt me down is the title of the performance that Jacopo Benassi dedicates to George Shiras, a late 19th century photographer who adapted hunting methods to photography by moving behind the bushes and lurking at night to capture his prey with a flash. “For years I have photographed at night behind the bushes imagining people who lived there. With this performance I want to be chased through the light from my flash and the sounds of my body.”
Jacopo Benassi, photographer and artist, lives and works in La Spezia, Italy. Over the years he developed a distinct style marked by a lack of depth of field and flash that has become a signature, a stylistic limit that Benassi imposes on himself to arrive at a raw and unmediated photography. The subjects photographed are highly disparate, ranging from the humanity that inhabits the underground and international music scene (starting with the experience of the Btomic club, managed by the photographer himself with some friends) to portraits of models, actresses, artists and designers published in the most important magazines, up to the investigation of the body, ranging from self-portrait to sexual encounters to ancient statuary. Benassi is also occasionally a performer and musician. His experimentation on performance is always linked to music and is mediated by the photographic image, the subject and object of his research. Recent solo exhibitions: PAST (2021) at the Francesca Minini Gallery in Milan, Vuoto (2020) at the Centro Pecci Prato, CRACK (2019) double exhibition at CAMERA – Italian Center for Photography in Turin and at the European Photography Festival in Reggio Emilia, and Bologna Portraits (2019) at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna. In collaboration with some of the protagonists of the Italian performance and visual scene, he created performative and photographic displays based on the practice of Live Shooting, like No Title Yet (2017) and Once More (2020) with Kinkaleri, and Rollers (2019) with Sissi. The 1861 United Agency published a monumental monograph: The Ecology of Image (2009). Benassi also published the photographic books FAGS (NERO, 2020), Dying in Venice (bruno, 2015), Bologna Portraits (Damiani, 2019), Mis Q Lee (Quinlan, 2018), The irrelevant aspects (Mondadori, 2016) with Paolo Sorrentino. He released the records ONCE MORE (Xing, 2021) with Kinkaleri, and Benassi plays Benassi (2019), sound and photographic documentation of his body, with remixes of Khan of Finland and Jochen Arbeit. www.jacopobenassi.com
by and with Jacopo Benassi
production Xing/Live Arts Week