Ernesta Caviola’s exhibition in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo

In the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo among the restoration scaffolding, the exhibition Towards the Light is a journey of color photographs from analogue plates and a video, which show the frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross Of Piero della Francesca. We talk about it with the author (and curator together with Rossella Sileno) Ernest Caviola (Imperia, 1964), through a reflection that claims the need to imagine reality starting from female perception.

Interview with Ernesta Caviola

Towards the Light is a project composed of twelve photographs and a video that “they question history, claiming the need to imagine a future starting from the female perception of realityCan you explain to us why this aspect is an urgency in your work, and how did you convey it here?
It is an urgency because the history we inherit is marked by a structural absence: the female gaze. The perception of women has been excluded from the processes of construction of memory and imagination. We know Piero della Francesca, but we ignore the visions of his contemporaries. The twelve photographs and the video act as emotional devices, amplifying the submerged sound of this past. The gaps, central in some photographs, are not only the material data reworked by the restorers, whose voices and stories weave the video, but sensitive forms of historical absence, the feeling of subjectivities expunged from the narrative of the past.

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This work was born somewhat by chance – thanks to the presence of the scaffolding necessary for the restoration work, which allowed you to physically inhabit the painted cycle, where you climbed with the optical bench, your narrative prosthesis. The body in your way of shooting and narrating is fundamental. Tell us why.
The narrative prosthesis is heavy, it weighs 35 kg! It wasn’t a period of great energy and happy health for me, but this put me in a radical posture, more radical than usual: my body couldn’t parry the blows that reality inflicts on me daily due to the fact of being a woman. I was in a state of analog vulnerability, my body couldn’t handle it. I thought I would stop taking photographs forever, that the time had come to hang up the view camera. Piero Della Francesca hit me physically, it was an epiphany of discomfort.

It is not the first opportunity for you to investigate the role of the feminine in the arts and in particular in architecture – I am thinking of your Architects association or the exhibition Looking for Lina of ’22 dedicated to Lina Bo Bardi. What is missing from this narrative to be credible and listened to, and how do you serve your role as director and photographer?
Are you asking me how to question official historiography and be believed? We are a subaltern class and the subaltern classes are discredited and unheard. And after saying this? Are we all going home? The work as a director, the work as a photographer is a mise en forms of this discomfort, a subtle discomfort, the discomfort of living in a world that doesn’t feel like my own. In the video the photos appear flying and crossing aquatic abysses, ironic and heartbroken, unhappy impertinent little girls. Rather than asking ourselves what is missing to be credible, we could ask ourselves how we establish the criteria of credibility, on what beliefs we base them.

Broadening your gaze on the collaborations that you have managed over time with various Italian and international designers, what idea emerges in your opinion of the relationship between architects, their architecture and its image?
I’ll give you an operational example: after thirty years of collaboration Gianluca Peluffo has curated, in an exemplary way, for Towards the Light, a diastematic site specific, and as he himself says in the catalogue: “The installation seeks a preceptive space of relationship through verbs and adverbs, not through nouns. Enter, climb, mount, get closer; while, during, slowly, now, here, near, inside, there, perhaps. Disassemble, reassembleThe relationship between architects, “female architects”, their architecture and my images lies in this – perhaps, dismantling and recomposing.

Tell us about the next projects you are working on now.
2026 opens with three new adventures, the first is photographic: The body of Rome. Two images of the project have just been released in the latest issue of Aboutdirected by Alessandro Valenti. The others are exhibition adventures, one in Venice, shared with my lifelong friend Gianluca Peluffo and with Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, and the other I can say for now will be in Rome.

Lucia Bosso

Arezzo // until January 6th
Ernest Caviola. Towards the light
BASILICA OF SAINT FRANCIS
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