Carlo Alberto Rusco is born in Torino, in Italy on the 29th of June 1989.
He first graduated in film direction and production at the International Academy of Audiovisual Sciences in Lugano in 2013, going on with his studies at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). In 2014, he graduated with high honors with a thesis on aesthetics of human bodies using experimental photography as the main media. He’s currently based both in Lugano, in Switzerland and Düsseldorf in Germany, working as a freelance photographer and filmmaker.
Since 2015, he’s also teaching audiovisual sciences at CSIA in Lugano. His recent work called Turistica has been selected for several national and international exhibitions like Vogue Italia Photovogue festival 2019 in Milan, Aperture summer open 2019: Delirious Cities, and at Aperture Foundation, New York.
About ‘Turistica‘ – words by Carlo Alberto Rusca:
After I spent some time around, in 2016 I came back to my home- town, Locarno near the lake Maggiore, due to family reasons. At first, I felt stuck: I had insomnia and I started to wander at night. The places I used to know were deeply changed: deformed by the noisy silence of the night.
I felt lonely and I decided to start taking pictures. It was like a therapy, a visual diary of my nocturnal rounds. At the beginning, it was rather a formal research of a personal language, something like the first approach of storytelling through photography. In a few months, I couldn’t stop taking photos. The turning point was the poems from Gli Strumenti Umani by Vittorio Sereni, the twentieth century Italian poet really close to my region. Through his words I started to feel empathic towards the territory, questioning myself about what remains in a land of nature, tourism, and memories; researching what is real and what is a representation of reality. These question, which are really important to me and my personal production, inspired my work and built the core of Turistica.
Turistica is an extra-geographic destination: it’s a guide of an unreal neighborhood. It’s about the fracture between a place which is always orderly and ready and who’s living in it. It’s about a swiss made low contrast attitude. It’s a visual journey dedicated to all the small tourist destinations and to their lonely citizens. Turistica takes place in Locarno, southern Switzerland, a tourist destination more than being my hometown.
The season is over. The Autumn wind shakes the branches of the trees, solitary witnesses in a motionless space. In a house of someone who cannot sleep, a television lightens up the pale white painted rooms. Empty hotel neon lights reflect their luminescence on the windscreen of my car. Silence is filled with small, almost imperceptible, sounds: old bulbs flickering, radiators and ventilation systems sizzling in the dark. Everything looks the same, orderly and ready. Perfectly outlined. It’s hard to not feel alone. I get out of the car and I light up a cigarette while watching a big calf vanishes like a ghost in the haze that has arisen in the meantime. His story is already written. He is stuck. Nothing can be changed. Here is the light of dawn. I think about the people I lost and who has lost himself in this place. Animals speak to me and palms look like fireworks. You couldn’t feel bad.
