The Earth Will Come To Laugh And To Feast

Description

The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast is a poetic journey through a carefully curated selection of internationally revered artist, Roger Ballen's photographs. Italian poet, Gabriele Tinti, reflects on Ballen's images with original texts written in the form of elegies, prayers, and laments. The text is appears in both English and Italian. The book evokes the strong bond between art and literature, and of ekphrastic writing that evokes images by highlighting hidden relationships and implied mysteries. The result is a moving collection of poems and short stories revealing the profound state of existence and the fate of our torment, the inevitability of suffering, and of our helplessness from pain. As Tinti says "This partnership moves from the rubble, passes through cemeteries, sniffs out the signs of what has gone. Roger Ballen's photos, my words, are a kind of defense against the terrible power of death. They are an accumulation of enthusiasm, injuries, obsessions. They are effigies composed to disturb the reader, to ambush the thought, the things."

Roger Ballen is one of the most important photographers of his generation. He was born in New York in 1950 but has been living and working in South Africa for over 30 years. Over the past 50 years his distinctive style of photography has evolved using a simple square format in stark and beautiful black and white. In his earlier works his connection to the tradition of documentary photography is clear but through the 1990s he developed a style he describes as "Ballenesque". Over the past two decades, Ballen has employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create enigmatic, mysterious sets for his images. Roger Ballen has invented a new hybrid aesthetic in these works but one still rooted firmly in photography. Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet, writer and a recipient of the 2018 Montale Poetry Award. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Roman Museum, the Capitolini Museums, the Archeological Museum in Naples, the Ara Pacis Museums and the Glyptothek of Munich composing poems for ancient works of art including the Boxer at Rest, Discobolus, Arundel Head, Ludovisi Gaul, Victorious Youth, Farnese Hercules, Hercules by Scopas, Elgin marbles from the Parthenon, Barberini Faun and many other masterpieces. His poems have been recited by actors such as Kevin Spacey, Joe Mantegna, Michael Imperioli, Burt Young, Marton Csokas, Alessandro Haber, Robert Davi, Jamie McShane, Vincent Piazza, Abel Ferrara, Malcolm McDowell and Franco Nero. In 2016 he published "Last words" (Skira) a collection of found poetry in association with Andres Serrano.

"As you turn the pages of this book, you seem to have entered the House of the God of the Dead himself and to pass from room to room in his dark palace, meeting on your way the irreducible pain of the world visible with wings prevented from beating by the barbed wire of our human curse." -- Jean-Baptiste Gauvin * The Eye of Photography * "Evoking the strong connection between art and literature, the book reveals the inevitability of suffering, and of human helplessness from pain." -- Constanza Falco Raez * Flaunt Magazine * "When moving from picture to picture in Ballen's latest book, The Earth will Come to Laugh and Feast, one gets the sensation of touring an asylum, peering into padded rooms, each containing its own cacophony of crude drawings, odd symbolisms, and unsettling gesturing of human form." -- Gregory Eddi Jones * LensCulture * "In an era in which statues are in fashion thanks to the iconoclastic fury of the inculturation of cancellation, Tinti le statues knows how to make them talk." -- Massimiliano Perrotta * Huffpost * "Ballen and Tinti have a vision that encompasses a wide spectrum of what impinges upon us - things that are not so neat and tidy, stuff that can creep up on us in our dreams and nightmares. The contexts for many of the figures in the images are indicative of the parts of life that are not so predictable - " -- Gerhard Clausing * PhotoBook Journal *