Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Flattened in Time and Space   
Witty Books, Turin IT, book spread, 2020
Looking On, Sguardi e Prospettive sulla Nuova Fotografia Italiana 
MAR – Museo dell’arte di Ravenna IT, exhibition view, 2019
Looking On, Sguardi e Prospettive sulla Nuova Fotografia Italiana 
MAR – Museo dell’arte di Ravenna IT, exhibition view, 2019
Looking On, Sguardi e Prospettive sulla Nuova Fotografia Italiana 
MAR – Museo dell’arte di Ravenna IT, exhibition view, 2019
Looking On, Sguardi e Prospettive sulla Nuova Fotografia Italiana 
MAR – Museo dell’arte di Ravenna IT, exhibition view, 2019
Bioscopic Books, curated by Tine Guns
Kunsthal, Gent BE, exhibition view, 2021
Bioscopic Books, curated by Tine Guns
Kunsthal, Gent BE, exhibition view, 2021

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Flattened in Time and Space is a visual family novel, whose plot develops around the figure of Concetto, born in Scicli, Sicily, in 1921. The photographs, extracted from family albums and re-assembled, were taken by his nephew, Angelo Vignali, by his family and friends. The sequence, which spans over fifty years, deprives the viewer of space-time coordinates and the identity of those who took the photographs, creating a new narrative. FITAS is a portrait drawn from the relationships between people, places and events that animated the stage of Concetto’s life. A succession of glances from the window overlooks the countryside: the abandoned farms and petrol stations, the Sicilian dusty hills, the sky and the Mediterranean Sea. The magnificence of the monuments, which we observe only a moment later eroded by time, abandoned. Only few background characters punctuate the landscape, up to that domestic interior, always the same, yet different in the most minute details: the house Concetto himself built, and where it still lives today.
Is there a ‘familiar lexicon’ in the way we look at and represent the places and people we hold dear - our history?
The path taken by Vignali in the construction of this project - which in fact sees its first and complete expression in the form of the book – finds an important key to reading in the studies of the American psychologist James Hillman (Healing Fiction, 1983), in regard to the role of fiction in psychotherapy. Narrating one's story is an imaginative process, a digestive operation, in which the individual observes and reorganizes the unfolding of the time of his life - the emanation of memories, dreams and fantasies. Vignali thus rewrites the plot, revises the past, until it finds a new internal coherence: he recognises himself by means of transcription (humanity’s guarantee of memory and eternity). In this context, the identity of the protagonist, his face, is only the epilogue of the journey.

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Awards
MACK First Book Award – Finalist
Fiebre Dummy Award – Finalist

Exhibitions
Bioscopic Books
MAR – Museo d' Arte della città di Ravenna

Press – Reviews
C4journal
Collector daily
Conscientious
Phroom
Exibart
Vogue
AnOthermag
British Journal of Photography
MACK
Vanessa Winship’s list of best photobooks 2020
Tim Carpenter’s list of best photobooks 2020

Collected By
MoMA Museum of Modern Art Library