Careof continues its collaboration with the investment bank of the Crédit Agricole group in Italy, under which the spaces of the Milan branch host projects by artists selected from the contemporary art archive DOCVA Documentation Center for Visual Arts.

Following the visionary painting of Silvia Idili (September – December 2012), the exhibition cycle continued with Marco Strappato's reflections on the concept of the imaginary (January – May 2013), concluding the first year of collaboration with the work of Giulia Ticozzi.

Giulia Ticozzi graduated in 2008 from the University of Milan with a degree in Human Sciences of the Territory and Landscape, with a thesis on social housing, and later earned a diploma in Photography from CFP BAUER in Milan. Interested in the various types of social processes that emerge in the city, she develops community-based participatory projects and public art initiatives, such as the recent Il mio libro sei tu, created as part of the Art Around project of the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea in collaboration with users of the Tilane Library in Paderno Dugnano.

She pays close attention to visual devices and our relationship with the images that flood our culture; her work often originates from the continuous flow of pre-existing representations, drawn from magazines, cinema, the web, and various types of documents. In this process, the images are subverted, manipulated, and reformulated to re-present reality through collage, photography, installations, and video.

At Crédit Agricole, the artist presents — in collaboration with Lorenzo Cattaneo — Self Categorization, an open photographic research project begun in 2010 with the aim of visually cataloguing the fragments of a phenomenon foundational to our socio-cultural reality.

Self Categorization is in fact inspired by a fascination with the human tendency to associate in groups based on shared interests. This phenomenon gives rise to a wide variety of different forms of aggregation.

Born from a natural predisposition and the need to share interests, knowledge, or technical skills, these groups are genuine building blocks that define and characterize specific areas within the social structure. Some remain unchanged over time, while others are mutable, adapting to the historical period and the context in which they develop. Their existence is guaranteed in two ways: internally, through the recognition of shared rules, characteristics, and bonds; externally, when their identity is confirmed by the recognition of that specific aggregation.

Through high-quality photographic portraits, Giulia Ticozzi and Lorenzo Cattaneo trace a path of fascination among life stories, details, and research, captured in the portraits of a group of people in historical costumes, a cooperative of artisans, a community living on the margins of civilization according to its own rules, a group of participants in a prenatal course, a Bollywood film crew, a family, the seven hundred students of a school…