The Flying Carpet

The Flying Carpet is an enchanting collection of colour and black-and-white photographs taken in and around Cesare Fabbri’s native Emilia-Romagna and Sardinia between 2005–2015. Under Fabbri’s lens we encounter a silent world roused from its slumber, where objects are animated and personified. Fabbri nods to the photographic practice of Luigi Ghirri, bringing to mind the Italian master’s words: “the camera is a magical toy capable of bringing together the great and the small, illusion and reality, our adult awareness and the fairy-tale world of childhood.” Indeed, in The Flying Carpet, we encounter scenes that might derive from comics – a rural hut with painted questioning eyes, a plant uprooted and hovering mid-air, and an embroidered carpet lifting up in the breeze.