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BARBARA GUSSONI
PHOTOGRAPHY
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Barbara Gussoni is an Italian-Senegalese photographic artist who has lived in Marseille since 2009.
She is also an art therapist and a writer. She has exhibited her work in Marseille, Barcelona, Budapest, Parma and Bologna.
At the end of the 1990s, she worked in Brescia as an assistant to advertising photographer Rinaldo Capra and as a photo reporter for the A2 agency. She attended the basic photography course at the Ken Damy Museum.
During this time she took part in the project “Alzheimer, conoscere chi non ricorda”, the first multimedia exhibition on Alzheimer's disease in Italy, with poetic texts and photographs.
After a long break to devote herself to writing, in 2018 she trained in contemporary art therapy in Arles. The town of “The meetings of photography” and the deepening of this discipline, which aims to help people “take back control of their speech”, led the artist to take her camera back in hand. The camera is now a digital camera. Inspired by the beauty and history of this Roman city, in July 2019 she will publish her first portfolio, “The places of meetings”, on the online magazine “L'Oeil de la Photographie”.
Other personal projects followed: "Amore", an emotional look at her father's illness and death; "We should all be feminists", a tribute to feminism through portraits of Barbies embodying women who played an important role in the history of women's emancipation; "13 men of cleaning", an invitation to men to pose nude while cleaning their homes.
Following her certification in art therapy, she is writing “A day in the life of...” a project based on photography that questions the representation of people with multiple disabilities. The project will be carried out with the participation of children with multiple disabilities and their families at a specialised centre in Marseille in 2020/21, and will culminate in an exhibition at the centre.
In 2023/24, she collaborated with the CNRS and the Fabrique des écritures in Marseille on a photographic exhibition with sound clips, “Treating the pandemic", the aim of which was to present nine portraits of hospital carers with foreign qualifications, to give an account of their migratory pathways and their professional practice during the Covid-19 pandemic in the south of France.
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Since 2018 she has been working regularly with “Gruppo Elettrogeno Teatro”, a social promotion association founded in Bologna in 1999, committed to the dissemination of theatrical art.
As part of a project conceived by the artist herself, ‘How theatre breaks into everyday life’, and in close collaboration with the director of Gruppo Elettrogeno, the artist took photographs, introducing the photographic gaze into the dramaturgical movement inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses.
The exhibition becomes an integral part of the performance in the form of a study, CreaturÉ™, which brings the trilogy inspired by the epic poem to a close, and which premieres at the Tpo in Bologna in December 2024.
This collaboration opened the photographer up to new artistic and human horizons, which she continues to explore.
She is interested in feminism, gender issues, inclusifs arts and migration. She works for the inclusion of people with disabilities.​
Literature and art therapy have influenced the way I photograph and forged my storytelling approach.
I have always felt the need to listen and tell stories. To console myself about life, I guess.
Writing has always been with me, since childhood.
I trained in art therapy in 2018.
Marguerite Duras used to say that if she had known beforehand what she was going to write, she would never have started a book. It is the same for me.
To photograph is to open oneself to the unknown, to expose oneself to the Other, to take the risk of going towards what is still unknown.
In silence, the gaze is activated.
Photography remains a surprise, a mystery that emerges from this silence. It often arises from improvisation and the ability to make with what I have at my disposal in the present instant.
This unexpected emergence of visual content becomes an emergence of unconscious content when it comes to photographing people.
My practice constantly interrogates the limits of the photographic medium as a way of relating to and understanding the Other. It explores the plausibility of his or her involvement in the visual co-writing of his or her story, which, through the photographic device, magically becomes mine as well.
Through photography I aspire to create connections, bonds between people of different cultures and backgrounds, to imagine ideal and poetic places of sharing, of meeting, of reuniting multiple artistic singularities.
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