Fabio Cussigh photographs his friends from the day a Minox 35 GL felt into his hands. He was eight years old and from this day he managed to transfigure the microcosm of his gang of friends in a world full and complete. Thirty-five years of shoots and a torrent of images taken on the spot, crude and impulsive yet of a surprising candor and audacity and in which life is revealed in all its spontaneity.

Cussigh tells us stories of love, friendship and identity that constitute a chronicle of his time. They all tell a story that is not one, but that rather form a collective autobiography. It is as if, through these traces of grunge and chaotic youth, emerged a look, a narrative coherence, an aesthetic. In these images everything comes to life again. Flirting, showing off, trying to be cool. There are tons of arrogant smiles, glances of a disarming frankness, attitudes that are sometimes pathetic, sometimes sublime. Music is omnipresent, as well as the widespread boredom of endless afternoons. We can feel the smell of cold tobacco, the first interrogations, the taste for transgression, the distrust, the very first self-assertion.
In the orbit of Californian photographers like Joseph Szabo and Nacio Jan Brown, Cussigh succeeds, with a thoughtful ease, to capture that indefinable interval which constitutes the long and arduous transition to adulthood. Whatever their age at the instant of the picture, all these characters are “works in progress”, incomplete beings. We jealously observe them while they carve out an existence against the flow, looking for another road, parallel to an adult world they do not want to be part yet. Like all of us, they probably feel now temperate, but in Cussigh’s photographs their insolence continues to radiate. And we rediscover through them the desire to turn immatures, rebellious, anarchist, radicals. Once again indifferent to the time that slips between our fingers.

On the occasion of the publication of “The Golden Age”, Arcipèlago is thrilled to present the exhibition of photographs by Fabio Cussigh. A dive into Youth, into this raw, instinctive and provocative energy that forms the pattern of our golden years.

The Golden Age
Photographs by Fabio Cussigh 1990—2010

edited by Charlotte Ménard
texts by Fabio Cussigh: collected, weighed and compiled by Gianni Rojatti
graphic design: Charlotte Ménard and Artemio Croatto
240 pages
printed in december 2023
Order you copy here — 35 €

Fabio Cussigh