Digital metamorphoses and cibachromes by Gaetano Armenio in a pitch-dark room: each visitor got a torch and a lavender sweet. Terlizzi, 2001.

I had visitors walk into a room that was completely dark. To each of them I handed two things, a pocket torch and a lavender-flavoured sweet. The works revealed themselves one at a time, inside the beam of light, without knowing what to expect at the next step. I wanted the images to emerge slowly, with the tension that comes when you do not see everything at once.

BILICO was an exhibition of digital metamorphoses, large-format cibachrome and video-graphics, at a time when digital techniques were only just entering photographic work. A hypnotic video ran alongside the route and set the rhythm at which you moved between light and shadow. The theme was the border between visible and invisible, and the darkened setting staged it before the photographs themselves.

I made the photographs, the digital processing, the video-graphics and the setup of the entire exhibition. The venue was the Galleria d'arte RA in Terlizzi.

An exhibition is not only what you hang on the wall. At BILICO the experience began in the dark, with a torch in hand. The photographs were the same for everyone, but each person discovered them in their own order, at their own pace. It was the first time I understood how much it matters how you let people into a room, not just what you put inside it.

Video > https://youtu.be/0hNgr_VsZQU

A reportage on Sicilian Holy Week rites, from Enna to Scicli, turned into audio-video projections in Molfetta. By Gaetano Armenio, 2005.

MISERERE was born in the field, in the processional rites of the Sicilian Holy Week. I photographed and filmed in Barrafranca, Enna, Scicli, Sortino, Melilli and Ferla, seven towns where the Easter processions are lived with an intensity that, once you watch it, changes the way you photograph. The reportage started with the Toscana Photography Workshop, under the guidance of tutor Andrea Pistolesi.

The material gathered in Sicily became a series of audio-video-photographic projections, presented in Molfetta at the Chiesa di San Pietro (the church of Saint Peter) on 11, 12 and 13 March 2005. The images carried the audience inside the rites, between sound, darkness and photography. Completing the evenings was the theatrical performance of Ninì Vernola, a collaboration that would return twenty years later in the exhibition PER CRUCEM AD LUCEM.

I produced the photographic and video reportage in the field, the editing and the staging of the projections, at the Chiesa di San Pietro in Molfetta, with a lighting and audio system handled directly by the technicians of the Festival della Taranta.

In Sicily I photographed rites that resembled the Apulian ones and were at the same time completely different. The same processions, the same staged sorrow, but another grammar. MISERERE taught me early something I would find again throughout my career. The rites of Holy Week look alike from afar and reveal their differences up close. The work is all there, in the up close.

press: www.exibart.com/evento-arte/gaetano-armenio-misere

Magritte's Lovers remade with Parma ham instead of the white cloth. A work by Gaetano Armenio for the Pesce d'Aprile group show, Bari 2003.

It was April Fools' Day, and I meant it. I remade Magritte's "The Lovers" with Parma ham in place of the white cloth, and underneath that slice of cured meat covering the face was me. The title does the rest of the work, "The Lover of Parma".

The piece was made for "Pesce d'Aprile" (April Fool), a contemporary art group show held, not by chance, on the first of April 2003. The date was already a statement of intent. The whole show played on irony and self-irony toward contemporary art and its system, and quoting Magritte only to swap his enigmatic cloth for something off a deli counter was my way of mocking the solemnity with which art so often speaks about itself. Using a slice of ham to say love, representation, identity.

I conceived and produced the photographic work "The Lover of Parma", shown at Galleria Spazio IKONOS in Bari.

What I learned. Contemporary art sometimes takes itself too seriously. "The Lover of Parma" was there to remind me, and whoever was looking, that a serious thing can be said even with Parma ham over your face. Irony takes nothing away from the work. Often it is what makes it stick.

A large-format cibachrome for the Vergine d'Oliva group show on the Mediterranean olive. Pinacoteca Provinciale, Bari, and the European Parliament, 2003.

My VERGINE D'OLIVA (Virgin of the Olive) is a frontal, mirrored face, split into two halves facing each other like an icon. The green background in vertical stripes recalls the light filtered through the leaves of an olive grove. A wooden, phallic-shaped element brings the masculine alongside the Marian icon, in a deliberate short circuit between the sacred, sexuality and the earth. I worked on the point of contact between modernity and tradition, and the devotional title pulled one way while the subject pulled the other.

The work is a large-format cybachrome I made in 2003 for a contemporary art group show with Italian and international artists. The theme was the olive as a cultural, spiritual and social symbol of the Mediterranean. The olive was the common thread, and each artist read it through their own language.

The group show had two venues. The Pinacoteca Provinciale di Bari (the provincial art gallery), from 31 May to 30 June 2003, and the European Parliament in Strasbourg, from 6 December 2003 to 6 January 2004. The large format of the cybachrome held together two distant things, the devotional echo of the title and the material rootedness of the subject.