The Far Site

(2024)

For more than ten years, roughly between 2008 and 2018, photographer Francesco Marchini has been following a group of Roman friends in their tireless dedication and love for graffiti. Far from being interested in the actual ‘pieces’ they realised, he carefully depicted the spaces and the places they crossed, with an attention to gestures, emotions and the unfolding of unpredictable events. From abandoned industrial sites to archeological ruines, from popular train yards to residential squats, the photographs he accumulated capture various intimate moments between the act of vandalism and the disillusioned passing of time, the struggle of day-to-day living and the dispelling of its hardships through playful activities. Looking back at this stratification of images, Marchini began to realise their narrative potential, the tension between documentation and fiction inherent to a well-defined historical and geographical episode that fits into a parable - that of the world of writing - in constant change. Striving to go beyond the surface of the Roman chapter of graffiti history, here we find the other, far side of it - almost as if it was a negative double of the city’s most known and told stories around writing.

In The Far Site, Marchini’s first monograph made in collaboration with Dutch publisher and printer Chemistry Publishing , the black and white photographs from the author’s personal archive dialogue with a fictional writing that tries to speculatively elaborate on these experiences - adding another layer of time and reflection in this story. The result is a narrative that, between images and texts, delves into the representation of a friendship that was marked by the experience of writing in the urban and suburban areas of Rome at a particular time.

Standard Edition of 250 copies (€35). Special Edition of 30 copies with a 30 x 40cm gelatin silver print on a 111 emulsion type paper, signed & numbered by the author (€90).

Author: Francesco Marchini
Publisher: Chemistry Publishing
Format: Softcover
Size: 17.6 x 25 cm
Pages: 136
Edition of: 250
Retail price: €35

Rome