“ERROR, TO ERR” 
“Blind to guilt, fate can be ruthless with the smallest distractions” J.L. Borges

I did right, did I do right?  This question torments us every day, repeatedly, and the possibility of a “mistake” often conditions our action. However, when technology is involved, it is often a relief: it went wrong, the result is not what I expected, but it is not my fault, but the “machina” that was wrong. And so, both in digital artistic expression and, in parallel, in the typing of a smartphone button or a computer, we create an island of irresponsibility. Except, then, reevaluate this “mistake” and its influence on our doing, in many respects. In the world of artistic practice (and here we also put photography, without fear of being denied) recognizing a “mistake” is often problematic experience. Every artist knows that making mistakes can also be a mistake of perception, first of all one’s own, and then of others. And this is because, to be honest, error is a matter of context and subjectivity. Clément Chéroux, author in 2003 of a lucky and incomplete book on error, links the concept of error (and its use) in photography to that of mimesis.  In summary, any deviation from the mimetic dimension is seen as a failure, given the fundamental link between the image and reality. But this consideration is denied by the best literature on the subject because the relationship with the referent must be seen in relation to the multiple “symbolic coordinates that determine what we experience as reality» (S. Žižek). In this continuous game of mirrors (opaque) between something we call “error” and something else that we identify as “reality”, here are the photographic works of this exhibition that are aimed exclusively at users to trigger mental processes of recognition, disvelation, appropriation, refusal, accession, contestation, etc. What is asked of the user is to verify the “errors” exposed and make a double recognition: that of reality and that of error even to deny them and consider the whole a mocking process set up by the author. Hence, the wandering, but with a double meaning: how to wander without external references of the user and as an errance of the author in the desert of the real. 

Massimo Stefanutti
President Circolo Fotografico La Gondola