For a man whose artistic practice involves little more than a camera and his own two feet, Roberto Lopardo is hard to catch in the studio. Since 2009, the Italian-American has been creating the Mapping series, which involves exploring a given area on foot and taking a frame every minute over the course of 24 hours. Those given areas are usually cities; Lopardo has now completed Mapping Dubai Parts 1 and 2, Mapping Sharjah, Kuwait, Doha, Jeddah, Bahrain, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Beirut, Venice and Mapping Latitude 45.36 Longitude -123.36 that was conducted on a piece of open countryside in Yamhill County, Oregon.
We find Lopardo contemplating such nuances in the belly of Dubai International Financial Centre’s Cuadro Fine Art Gallery, where he is the gallery manager; alongside organising and curating their many exhibitions, he also occasionally finds time to peruse his own work.
However, he is the first to admit it is a rare occurrence.
“It’s strange, I’m not sure how much time I’ve spent thinking about the process. I’ve spent so much time thinking about how to get from city to city that I haven’t really thought about the fact I’ve shot 12 cities. Now I think it is about time to sit down and think about how they went.”
By the very public nature of the projects and the affinity many people feel with the end results, the Mapping series has been very successful. After the first in Dubai in 2009, the US Consulate General commissioned a second in 2011, where Lopardo walked from his home in Dubai Marina to the new consulate in Bur Dubai, and the finished product now hangs in the consulate building to engage newcomers to the city.
The third in Bahrain, in April 2011, was completed during the period of civil unrest and accompanied by Bashar Al Shroogi, the director of Cuadro. The pair needed a permission letter from the minister of culture to photograph freely and were still stopped every hour by the military.
For the Jeddah series, he also needed help from authorities to complete the project and in Jerusalem, the constant security issues and the fact that it was very cold exhausted him.
However, these particular difficulties forced him to his artistic limits, which gave him a run of 15 photographs that remain his favourite from all 12 cities.
“It was freezing, it was late at night and I had been up for 21 hours,” he recalls. “I took a cab to get over the checkpoint, the driver threw on the hot air and immediately I started to pass out.
He does not carry a map, nor does he plan a route – other than the time he was heading towards the US consulate – he only thinks about where he will start and where he will finish.
And after 12 cities, he doesn’t see himself finishing any time soon. “It could keep going and going. For me as an artist, I can’t exhaust the material,” he says, explaining that Cairo, Amman and Muscat are on the horizon.
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