projects

“My whole life has been based on experimentation in a global sense: not photographic but existential”.

Fabio Donato considers himself to be a “reporter of culture”, a privileged witness of the changes of our times, approaching photography and art as a way to understand society and its social and existential connections.

His artistic career which began in the 1960s, a period of great cultural and social excitement, gains his first experience from his journey to India – where photography becomes an instrument of self-exploration and cultural blending – and from his artistic work with the Living Theatre in Naples which will be inspiring for him to develop new art and multimedia languages. His work, built up along fifty years of activity, can be analyzed from two peculiar viewpoints: the “wayfarer among the arts” inquiring into the evolution of artistic languages through meetings and conversations with the leading figures of the avantgarde movements from the 1970s to the present and his research for a personal visual poetics through which he looks into the existential dimension of contemporary man and his relationship with the other, collected in the work cycle: time/movement/threshold.

Wayfarer among the arts

“Images have the power to bring the great social tragedies to light and to embody the development of contemporary thought. The photos of the Indian teenagers’ feet, now an exhibit in the Museo della Metropolitana in Naples, are still powerfully evocative of an increasingly actual gap between wealth and poverty, just like the shots with the German artist Joseph Beuys, met in Dusseldorf at the academy where he worked as a teacher: they are not only a meeting for the photographer but also a moment of strong political and social sharing”.

time movement threshold

The Living Theatre has turned the theatre languages upside-down, transforming the interaction between actors on stage and the audience in the stalls into a single language of the show and laying the bases for a new social model of art. It has paved the way for the digital and social media, the selfie, the spontaneous and disorderly approach of all media characterizing the era of digital transition today, in which the digital dimension and sharing prevail in photography and creativity”.