UPCOMING EXHIBITION EARLY 2026
FRANCESCO TORI AND LINDA ZAMBOLIN - ONCE A UPON A TIME - PHOTOGRAPHY AS INCARNATION OF PLACE - chapter 1
DURING A 2026 ( A YEAR OF GRAZING)
FRANCESCO TORI AND LINDA ZAMBOLIN, #1, PHOTOGRAPHY, HAND-TINTED AND WAXED PIGMENT PRINT, EDITION
Creative Archetype, photography as the incarnation of place
The photography of Creative Archetype, the duo composed of Linda Zambolin and Francesco Tori, speaks a language familiar to those who know how to listen to places. Every place has a soul, a vibration, like a voice that completely permeates it, provoking that metaphysical shiver that ignites creative action.
It is about creativity, pure, crystalline, like spring water, a refreshment in the modern contemporary world, blinded by the art of economy, the commercial art that, by virtue of its projection toward the future, loses its own “here and now” of lived experience.
The “present” of life has been lost, of existence, which instead Creative Archetype seems to want to cry out with an elegance that never flaunts but makes one reflect—so originally close to the great questions of humanity.
The hidden voice of the world, that whispers in the place, stripped of interest, from the chaotic race toward nothingness, does not so much provide answers but rather makes us ask: who are we? A trivial question, perhaps yes, perhaps not at all, certainly tied to each one’s journey. Who has never dared to ask themselves about their own identity?
We are in order to be—this could already seem like an answer, and Creative Archetype leads us to ask, within “who we are,” precisely this. Who are we? We are to be, and to be we must absolutely push away non-being, the void. We must “fill ourselves with being,” with what allows us to appreciate the present moment, like emotion.
Creative Archetype feeds on and is nourished by emotions. The vintage, the meticulous recovery of time in the photographed image, is precisely this: a will to welcome history as return, and this return—the inner journey of each person to and for themselves—is a path of recovery of human identity, of the image that presents humanity to itself as a being of emotion, not only of reason, of logos.
Once upon a time recovers the density of present existence, which is otherwise rarefied in the current world. It seems like a game in reverse: the photography that fixes the image in this project by Creative Archetype is, in fact, deliberately treated to appear nineteenth-century, romantic, with a blurred aspect—and yet, it has an enormous sharpness of focus, because it shows us, makes us truly see what matters: the strength of place, its voice, it makes the soul of that place accessible. This is in contrast with the clarity of certain photography, perhaps perfect, but that renounces the right to imperfection.
It is imperfection that makes us human, and thus along the imperfect detail runs the capacity to feel oneself and perceive one’s own uniqueness—what truly makes us perfect to ourselves, making us therefore unique, but also free. Free to be, authentic, not to appear according to a pre-established canon, a structure. It is the self that places its own inner Self above the deep valleys of the social mechanism of illusion, of forced perfection, imposed, not chosen. It is not the fruit of will—perfection society imposes itself—while Creative Archetype, with meticulous work beneath the surface of the image, of photography, recovers that vast portion of being that forcefully resists the degradation of imperfection into perfection, and therefore of the Self into a non-Self.
FRANCESCO TORI AND LINDA ZAMBOLIN, #11, PHOTOGRAPHY, HAND-TINTED AND WAXED PIGMENT PRINT, EDITION
Beneath the skin of the person, it welcomes that stifled cry of personality that would like to come out, even scratch the world, for the sole purpose of saying: “I exist.” Ultimately, no being can fall in love with perfection—whereas, in imperfection lies self-love, forgiveness, and reconciliation with one’s own being.
Creative Archetype deconstructs the present into an image of the past, resolving the present in the continuity between inner and outer, soul and world, which can find resolution only in the subject.
Where, then, is the subject in art? Here it is—in Creative Archetype, it is the subject who exposes itself, its own living flesh, to the public; its own inner sea. Emotion breaks the silence and asserts itself powerfully beyond the concrete barrier of calculating reason.
It is a demanding undertaking, that of Creative Archetype; it is not simple to make oneself into subjects capable of listening in a world that is mostly deaf. But just as Beethoven continued to compose despite his deafness, so too is born a masterpiece of aesthetic sensitivity.
In Once upon a time, Creative Archetype takes nature—understood as a complex system of interaction between human and world—and makes it its own, digested by human subjectivity purified of the impasse condition of contemporary non-being and interest-driven chaos. The result is exceptional: to speak humanly to humanity, all the fruit of a continuous listening to the soul of places, with that characteristic black and white, with the wooden frame, with the gentle surfacing of the image that seems to hover like the ending of a poem—so powerfully evocative.
To conclude, everything flows from emotion and becomes flesh: photography comes to life, acquires lived experience, that of the photographers through emotion, and can carry out the task not of mechanical assumption of reality, but of its comprehension—of something made one’s own, retained.
Once upon a time is not just a photographic project, but the restitution of soul to places and, perhaps, of soul to humanity which, like a sad and lonely wanderer, has traded its own happiness for a need, believing itself to become rich, only to discover itself infinitely poor.
Giuseppe Maria Andrea Marrone
FRANCESCO TORI AND LINDA ZAMBOLIN, #6, PHOTOGRAPHY, HAND-TINTED AND WAXED PIGMENT PRINT