Time for a Coffee (Live Project)

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About Time for a Coffee (Live Project)

Introduction

“Time for a Coffee in front of the lens” is a black and white photographic project, a live event of interaction with people ready to be photographed while having an offered coffee.

To promote the “espresso culture” throughout Italy as a moment of aggregation, a pause, to emphatize how frenzy and schedule let us to cut down more and more the time we allow to each other and to socialization.

The coffee as a pretext to take back our time, to steal a moment to the run of this speeding up society, which is loosing sight the communication, the dialogue and the pleasure to spent time in front of a coffee cup, seated in a bar table.

It becomes also a cue to grab and immortalize the various ways to make this simple and everyday gesture, capable to join all of us and to distinguish each other in the little differences of the habits – who licks the teaspoon after revolving, who drinks it in one breath, who instead tastes it slowly in mistical exaltation.

The project

During 2006 has been organize thee events in Brescia, Genova and Rome in three different locations (a pub, a bar in a square and another in the characteristic dark alleys of Trastevere), equipped with a table and a photographic lamp, to illuminate the scene and to attract the attention of passers.

The need to start a conversation with who is in front of the lens, to speak, to put at easy, becomes a way to remove attention from the camera and to give it to the dialogue.

The situation becomes much more interesting when a couple, not a single, sits down. They start accomplices in the common uncomfort, but they let themself go in the end , like the photographer had gone away.

Future developments

In the future other events of the same kind will be organized in other cities in Italy (Bologna, Milan, Pescara and Rome again). The photographic material will be then compiled in a traveling exhibition (in the same cities where the photos have been taken and in other exibition areas).

The long-term project, in addiction to the publication of a photographic catalogue with the best pictures, is to bring the project in the European countries where the “espresso culture” is becoming rilevant, to help this trend end to promote the well known marriage between art and italian-style.


Technical specifications

To realize the events of “Time for a Coffee in front of the lens” series, we need these features:

a)a bar / refreshments point where is possible to agree a prevision of coffee during the event;

b)usage of electricity for a photographic lamp with a reflecting umbrella (for nighe or low light locations events);

c)a space to set as location (with a coffee table, an armchair or anything equivalent);

d)promote the event with a manifest (50x70cm or 70x100cm). The manifest is printed on a outdoor platic material and can be mounted on an indipendent stand.

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