Lara Micheli
Extrasystoles. When the heart stumbles...
Curated by Gregor Beltzig and Teona Gogichaishvili
Born
on April 8, 1990 in Geneva, Lara began studying Art History in Paris. After
obtaining a license and an internship in the Photography Department of
Artcurial, she continued her training by following the online teaching of the
International Center of Photography in New York (2017-2021). The Polaroid
imposed itself as a revelation in 2014 during a series of fashion images
commissioned from it. She never changed cameras and kept “this essential tool”
that (SX-70) has become for her a mean to develop her personal photographic projects. His images have
been the subject of several publications (Elle, Fisheye, Artsper, 1NSTANT,
Mauer, Le Point…).
Perhaps
you also know this feeling, when suddenly your heart almost threatens to jump
out of your chest out of loud emotion! A feeling of climax, intoxicating, but
always accompanied by a shadow. The shadow of melancholy, the fear that
suddenly everything dear to you could disappear, dissolve into thin
air... Do you also know this ambivalence? The intense feelings between
euphoria and fear? Between pleasure and pain? How was it again, there is no
sunshine without the clouds… Since our birth, transience accompanies us –
fragilitas, transitum. Everything is finite, everything dissolves at some
point. But perhaps that is what makes life so precious. The need of people to
capture the special moments of life surely comes from this. What are the
special moments anyway? The birth, the wedding, the death? What about the
times in between? Seemingly inconspicuous moments full of tenderness, devotion,
love, longing, loss, anger, grief or many unspoken desires... When
I first saw Lara Micheli's photographs, I felt directly attracted by her visual
language. They were for me like silent poems that hide a lot between the lines,
the images that capture different moments of everyday life in a poetic way and
touch the heart without the false sentimentality. Lara's works are for me
like haikus, like unfinished, open texts that only complete themselves in the
reader's experience.
„The glow is extinguished in the sky, the eternal stars quietly rise.“ Arno Holz (1863-1929)
Teona Gogichaishvili