Orti in Blu - Annamaria Castellan

The hole of a pinhole camera processes information as well as the software and hardware systems of a mobile phone, only in a simpler way.

Even simpler is the photograph called "cyanotype", which in principle only needs two salts of iron and sunlight. Anna Atkins, botanist and first female photographer, experimented with this technique and created the historic and extraordinary Herbarium. In his work, the technical process of cyanotype has proved to be at the service of both scientific and artistic expression. It was taken as an example by scientists and photographers, although cyanotypy is used today by artists.

If in the first place it can be said that the cyanotype is the processing of information with the use of solar energy but with simpler methods than Shannon or Turnig claim, then, observing the process of making a cyanotype, the process becomes more understandable creative of the images of the external world inside our brain.

Annamaria Castellan's interest in off-camera photographic techniques, such as cyanotype, oxidations, lucigrams, photograms or rayograms and forosthenopeic, was born in 2001 as an experimentation of the creative process cleared by mechanisms and investigation into visual communication. Physics & Art against CO2, Annamaria Castellan proposes Orto in Blu, an exhibition of her cyanotypes and those of her students. They are creative images that can bring to mind the cave paintings, those found 50,000 years ago on the walls of the caves, and which are made, perhaps, by repeating the gestures of the time. The cyanotypies of the exhibition represent a large variety of flowers and plants, biomasses useful for renewable energy, and the oldest botanical garden in the world, the Botanical Garden of Padua, a place where they are preserved and protected. For visitors to Pysics & Art Against CO2 Annamaria Castellan will offer a cyanotype workshop open to all.