Tomorrow's inauguration,
Sunday, September 20, at 11 a.m., of Capolupi Factory, the new space of Lorenzo Capolupi, who for over 15 years has been traveling through and photographing abandoned places in Italy and Europe: villas, theaters, cinemas, sacred sites, institutions, and industrial architecture. This is a visual territory widely explored in contemporary photography, yet in his work it takes on a distinctive character. Abandonment is not sought for the allure of decay or the seduction of ruin, but as a condition through which to question what survives the function of a place once human presence has disappeared and its traces continue to settle on things.
Capolupi's photography, as explained in a press release, is born in this suspension. The deserted interiors retain a domestic quality, at times solemn; the objects left behind, the marked surfaces, the light filtering through spaces now unused compose a geography of absence in which time acquires an almost physical consistency. "I do not photograph ruins. I photograph the persistence of memory," states Capolupi, pointing with precision to the core of his research.
Since 2009, Capolupi has been returning to the same question, building over time a vast archive in which abandoned architecture ceases to be a mere subject and becomes a measure of time. His gaze shuns the more immediate aesthetic of urbex and the pursuit of the striking image: what matters is the silent relationship between the space and the lives that have passed through it.
Capolupi works with digital medium format and tilt-shift lenses; post-processing addresses light, color, contrast, and perspective without introducing or reconstructing elements through generative artificial intelligence. Every photograph preserves the testimony of an encounter that actually took place between the eye and the place. From this research, Capolupi Factory is born — the new space in Follonica where studio, gallery, fine art printing laboratory, archive, and viewing room bring together the entire creative process, from shooting to printing, through to the signing and certification of the work.
Tomorrow's event takes place at via dell'Agricoltura 104 in Follonica, in a day organized in collaboration with Galleria Il Sole in Rome. On the occasion of the inauguration, Tempus Fugit will be presented for the first time — an unpublished photographic volume by Lorenzo Capolupi: 91 photographs across 100 pages, in the 30 x 30 cm format, gathered in a first edition of 100 copies.
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