SPARE PARTS EXHIBITION an eleven pm five am bite
Catalog of the photographic exhibition by Margareta Moen
A bite from the forbidden apple.
SPARE PARTS EXHIBITION an eleven pm five am bite – For years Margareta Moen has documented and explored the Italian alternative clubbing scene, focusing on its dark and queer subcultures and the most discussed, ambiguous, and authentic margins of a world that has always refused compromise and lives according to its own rules. Unwritten rules, unsaid rules. Tacit rules, yet shared.
Moen approaches her subjects from the inside, documenting youth, framing the energy before the moment fades, conveying a sense of vitality, not staging, making participation and sharing central elements of her work. Her images do not observe from a distance, but silently inhabit, on tiptoe, the space between photographer and subject, where identity, performance, and presence overlap one another, in harmony. Through photographs mostly in black and white, she captures moments that are at once raw and intimate, powerful but never intrusive, caught in the thick of action or in the portrait tout court. These are not stolen images, but shared fragments of lived experience, in which transgression becomes language.
If at the origin there was the verb, now it is the body, the matter, that transforms into a surface of construction and affirmation of the self. Spare Parts is an exhibition that extends beyond a linear documentation of the night. The title evokes fragments, scraps, residual material. Images that escape a unified narrative of nightlife.
The subtitle ELEVEN PM FIVE AM BITE defines the temporal and conceptual perimeter of the work; bite suggests a partial, immediate, and visceral access to a broader and uncontainable reality. A taste, a bite from the forbidden apple, an invitation to go further, to strip away every preconception, to exit our own Eden and enter a new world. A world that asks for no permissions, asks for no discounts. This catalog collects a selection of images on show created over the course of various projects, building a layered and non-linear archive of a modus vivendi that resists categorization and remains in continuous transformation. (Critical text by Nicolò Barbarisi)