This is an unpublished project premiered today on C41 Magazine.
Kurt Bauer is a self-taught photographer based in Austria. Working at the intersection of photography and design, Bauer explores the semantics of the everyday, revealing and reimagining materials, processes and histories. He documents personal impressions with the photographs he takes. It’s an expression of how he sees and looks at curtain things. Obsessed with detail and with a kind of romantic streak.
About Tuffarsi – words by Kurt Bauer:
Living in landlocked Austria, Trieste is one of the closest sea destinations that can be reached within 3 hours. My parents took me there for the first time when as a kid, and almost three decades later I can still vividly recall the sensual experience during that informative visit: The smell of freshly sweet ‘cornetto con crema’, Frutti di mare, spaghetti vongole, seagulls, the taste of silky Italian gelato, and the different cars and bikes turning the streets and pavements into a riot of colour.
And yet possibly the most remarkable for the eight year old me – or maybe it’s the adult memory of this me – was the first whiff and sight of the sea.
The travel restrictions of the pandemic have acted as a withdrawal of the senses, so that when I returned to Trieste the sensations were stronger unconsciously motivating me to capture “The Italy” I encountered aged eight. I realise I was filled with nostalgia and longing, wanting to see the ‘there’ through ‘here’. The word I like the most from this Trieste trip and chosen as the project title is “tuffarsi”. Diving in to the Italy that was, is, and might be.
