Darkrooms of Memory

A door ajar, the rustle of paper, the milky glow of a glass plate: the exhibition opens where the museum usually falls silent. With Hidden Collections, Giorgio Di Noto enters the institution’s backstage and treats it as a landscape to be explored: photographic archives, storage rooms, and conservation labs become darkrooms of memory - places where the past is not displayed but prepared for viewing. Here, prints, negatives, and plates surface like stratified finds - images, scratches, erasures, fingerprints - an interweaving in which time is part of the work. The fulcrum is the Photographic Archive, investigated like an archaeological site from which to extract and re-mediate iconographies. Di Noto shifts attention to the tools that have shaped our gaze - the photographic mask -  that black border that isolates the object - turns from a “neutral” technique into a critical gesture. It highlights and removes, reveals and conceals, tracing the shifting boundary between document and invention. The result is a series of images that reflect on institutions’ selective power - on what enters the narrative and what remains at the margins.
Entrusting an artist with reading the museum’s hidden holdings means acknowledging that neither archaeology nor photography is ever innocent - both choose, edit, and construct meaning. In this fertile ambiguity, Hidden Collections turns the invisible into living matter, inviting us to rethink memory not as a closed archive but as an open, continuously rewritable process.