(photo credit: Bruno Cianci/RMK Museum)
Artist’s profile: STEFANO BENAZZO
Art subjects: stranded ship wrecks, sea, architecture, nature
Place of birth: Casablanca (Morocco), 1949.
Style: Stefano Benazzo is an Italian sculptor, model maker, and photographer who devoted his life to the memory of abandoned ships, hunting wrecks from Iceland to Namibia, from Canada to Greece. Benazzo tells a story. Wrecks on shores have a positive connotation: they prove that their crews were saved as the ships stayed afloat. These carcasses remain as silent witnesses of an era that saw the ships swarming with sailors busy with their work.
Career: thanks to his unique research over 50 years, Benazzo was invited to the Venice Biennale in 2015. His traveling photo exhibition “Duty of memory” was hosted in Italy and abroad: in 2019 at the two Rahmi Koç Museums, in Ankara and in Istanbul (Turkey); in 2018 at the Municipal Gallery of Art, in Piraeus (Greece), and at the Regional House of the Sea, in Sète (France).
(photo credit: Beatrice M. Serpieri)