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"Benches" by Francesca Della Ratta

I asked him about the garden and his bench. When the evening is clear, I look up at the sky. I never cease to be amazed, there are so many points of view up there, he replied. Wislawa Szymborska

In the accelerated fluidity of the contemporary metropolis, street furniture risks being reduced to a mere backdrop of perpetual transit. Francesca  Della Ratta's work Benches radically opposes this drift, electing the bench as a privileged observatory and temporal decompression device. "In a society with increasingly compressed times, the bench seems to offer us an alternative vision," explains the photographer. The author transforms an ordinary object into a democratic stage in which a micro-ritual of resistance to haste is consumed.

The series maps a multifaceted humanity that regains the right to pause: friends chatting, passers-by absorbed by smartphones, gazes lost on the horizon. The bench thus becomes a polysemic space. As Della Ratta points out, "it is the same place but its function varies depending on who uses it"; it offers rest, but also memory when it is dedicated to those who are no longer with us.

Della Ratta's, however, is not a detached voyeurism, but an exercise in urban empathy and psychogeographical exploration. The photographic act becomes a pretext for relationship: "a precious moment of detachment, observation and human contact". In this investigation, the bench ceases to be just a physical garrison and reveals itself for what it really is: an infrastructure of the soul, the last refuge for interaction and urban contemplation.

Sonia Pampuri