Marco Meneguzzo

Opening Wednesday 24 May
Museo degli Innocenti at 5pm
galleria Il Ponte from 7pm to 10pm

Il Ponte rounds off the exhibition season with the solo show Tatay. Con la coda dell’occhio (Tatay. Out of the Corner of My Eye) by Marina Ballo Charmet.

The project is linked to the video installation Tatay, which will be presented on Wednesday 24 May at 6.30pm in Sala Grazzini at the Istituto degli Innocenti in Florence.
The opening of the video installation will be preceded at 5pm by a roundtable on the topic of “caring masculinity” in the presence of artist Marina Ballo Charmet. Introduced and coordinated by Erika Bernacchi (researcher at the Istituto degli Innocenti); speakers: Gustavo Pietropolli Charmet (psychiatrist and psychotherapist, founder of Associazione Il Minotauro); Arabella Natalini (director of the Museo degli Innocenti); Marco Meneguzzo (Tatay. Con la coda dell’occhio exhibition curator).

In the Tatay (father in Filipino) video installation, the artistic research of “Marina Ballo Charmet is an elegant and poetic reflection on the topic of fatherhood, in which sound and image entwine and strengthen each other, bringing us private and personal voices and gestures from everyday life that are universal and ancestral at the same time” as Stefano Boeri wrote for the presentation at the Triennale in Milan. The project was presented at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in 2022.
A dark sound environment in which 12 voices of fathers from different countries, speaking different languages, sing a lullaby to their children. The series of voices blend into a single ancestral, primordial voice, which does not speak but sings, against the gesture, repeated in the projection, glimpsed in the dark, of fathers cradling their babies.

The gallery presents the photographic side of this artistic research for the first time, in the shape of twelve large-format colour photographs from the Tatay project, made over the past few years. They refer to male parenthood and to the primary father-child relationship. Often details of zones of contact between father and very young child suggest a tactile and olfactive intimacy.

Six large-format, black-and-white silver-salt print photographs from the original con la coda dell’occhio work (1993–94) are on display on the lower ground floor of the gallery. In them, the edges of the city are seen from below, by placing the lens at the height of a three- or four-year-old child and recording the urban fabric from that viewpoint, in particular sidewalks, traffic dividers and unpaved surfaces. A repertoire of images whose leading player is everyday life, everything that is around us, seen out of the corner of our eye…
“Marina Ballo Charmet rejects the anthropocentric view of an exact and presumably objective vision. The gaze no longer takes a step back but participates in a mental and psychological way. From one project to another, the static or moving image is a place of an experimental, undefined intimacy” (Jean-Francois Chevrier).