DéVoilées Conference Auditorium Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

DéVoilées
Conference
Auditorium Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

13th September 2018

The inaugural conference for DéVoilées took place at the auditorium of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo on the evening of the exhibition’s opening. Introduced by a welcoming speech from Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the event brought together curator Valerio Consonni, hair designer and entrepreneur Franco Curletto, and artist Alessandro Vasapolli for a public conversation that retraced the conceptual, aesthetic, and technical genesis of the series.

More than a formal presentation, the encounter offered an opportunity to reflect collectively on the artistic process and on the collaborative relationships that shaped the project. Curator Valerio Consonni framed the discussion by contextualizing DéVoilées within Vasapolli’s wider practice – one rooted in the philosophical interrogation of perception and the limits of vision. He underlined how the series, though composed of portraiture, refuses the traditional logic of disclosure. Instead, it constructs a visual threshold where the body is partially withdrawn, and presence manifests through absence.

This central paradox—of showing through concealment – was at the heart of the conversation between Vasapolli and Curletto. Together, they revisited the moments of conception and creation behind the images, exploring the subtle visual language developed through their collaboration. Curletto, who designed and realized the hairstyles of each portrayed woman, offered insight into how hair became a narrative and structural element in the photographs. Vasapolli elaborated on his decision to represent the subjects from behind, explaining how this choice was not a stylistic device, but a way to decenter the gaze and disrupt conventional relationships between viewer and subject. The photographs thus become less about recognition, and more about resonance—they invite projection, interpretation, and introspection. In this sense, the act of seeing becomes active, incomplete, and deeply subjective.

Throughout the discussion, the speakers also addressed broader questions concerning identity, authorship, and the role of the viewer. What does it mean to construct an image without the need to reveal? Can anonymity heighten intimacy? And to what extent is meaning a co-creation between the artist, the subject, and the spectator?

By bringing together voices from visual art, curatorship, and applied aesthetics, the conference offered insight into the layered nature of DéVoilées – a series that is at once technically rigorous and conceptually open. The event emphasized how each work in the exhibition operates not as a finished statement, but as a site of potential, inviting the audience to inhabit a space where visibility is uncertain and where truth, if it appears, does so obliquely.

The evening reinforced the exhibition’s central proposition: that photography, rather than documenting what is known, can offer access to what remains unresolved—to what hovers at the edge of appearance, just beyond the threshold of the visible.