Alfio Tommasini
Via Lactea
Edition Patrick Frey, Zürich — 2020
Via Lactea brings together tableau-like landscape photographs taken between 2015 and 2019 as well as precise yet intimate portraits of painterly quality, facing the farmers and their livestock. Tommasini's project undertakes a graphic study of the relationship between humans, animals and topography in the context of a rapidly changing and increasingly technologically advanced agriculture and dairy industry. Because all the people and things a city needs to survive lived behind the urban scenes. The other side of the coin are the well-organized and digitized agricultural economies, gigantic warehouses and data centers (Rem Koolhaas). The non-urban areas seem - positively as well as negatively - to be once again places of great transformation. Via Lactea opens a glimpse into a microcosm of this periphery that is by no means folkloric and romanticized, because the insignia of this technological, co-evolutionary upheaval subtly flash up again and again in the image details of clothing, tools and machines.
