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08 June 2024 - 19 January 2025, Villa MALPENSATA, Lugano
The MUSEC in Lugano celebrates the photography of Fosco Maraini, twenty years after his death, with the largest retrospective that has ever been dedicated to him, the result of a research project launched two years ago that has involved the main institutions that preserve and enhance his work from the very beginning. It is thus possible to definitively assign to Maraini the role he deserves in the history of photography and, at the same time, to reflect on several levels on the fundamental values of an art form that today, faced with the new frontiers of technology, questions its very substance. A reflection aimed at underlining how every representation of reality, be it concrete or abstract, only makes sense in time if it is able to restore a spiritual universe and an original vision of the world.
The exhibition at Villa Malpensata in Lugano presents 223 photographs, some of them previously unpublished, taken between 1928 and 1971 in Europe and Asia. The choice of the photographs is the result of an in-depth exploration of Maraini's photographic archives, from the hundreds of illustrated publications that first made it possible to define the chapters with which to structure the project, to the thousands of negatives conserved at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence. Taking into account the ‘discoveries’ in progress, the missing or unusable negatives and the comparative choices necessary to guarantee harmony and visual coherence, the selection thus took shape. The itinerary of the exhibition curated by Francesco Paolo Campione, director of MUSEC, restores the facets of Maraini's photography: a photography of men and cultures; of landscapes that open onto infinity; of interior architectures in which the secret geometries of the inner world reverberate; of details that are revealed amidst the plots of a reality interpreted with rare intelligence and described with a cultured and extremely fine aesthetic. They are images ‘seized all'empresente’, as Maraini liked to say with one of her surprising neologisms. Images, that is, caught in that unrepeatable moment in which the eye is given to perceiving the movements of the heart and soul.
Concept, realisation and promotion: MUSEC-Museo delle Culture, Lugano
Other promoters: Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia, Firenze; Fondazione Primo Conti, Fiesole; Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario «G. P. Vieusseux», Firenze
In collaboration with: Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Rom; Museo di Antropologia e Etnologia, SMA, Università degli Studi di Firenze; Museo delle Civiltà, Roma
Production: Fondazione culture e musei, Lugano
With the support of: Città di Lugano; Repubblica e Cantone Ticino, Fondo Swisslos; Fondazione Lugano per il Polo culturale; Fondazione Ada Ceschin e Rosanna Pilone, Zurigo.
Media partner: RSI Rete Due; sichtbar.art
THE CATALOGUE
The exhibition comes with a catalogue in Italian published by Skira and edited by Francesco Paolo Campione. It includes all the photographs in the exhibition and an additional section of six previously unpublished portraits of Anna Magnani, taken during the shooting of the film Volcano (1949). The volume includes eight thematic in-depth studies, an anthology of texts by Maraini on photography, the testimonies of his daughters and widow, and a wealth of apparatuses that make it a reference work for future studies on Fosco Maraini.
Francesco Paolo Campione (ed.), L’immagine dell’empresente. Fosco Maraini. Una retrospettiva, Skira (Esovisioni/14), Milan 2024, 616 pages. 23 full-page three-colour illustrations full-page, 230 catalogue’s ill. (214 in three-colour and 16 in colour). ISBN 978-88-572-5165-3. CHF/€ 72.
È impossibile “catalogare” Fosco Maraini, se non utilizzando formule che implicano fantasiosi giri di parole. “Non è solo un fotografo”, “non è solo un divulgatore” “non è solo…” molto altro. Maraini ha insegnato a milioni di lettori in lingua italiana e nel mondo a provare curiosità e stimolare la conoscenza. Ma Fosco Maraini ha lasciato soprattutto, in chi l’ha conosciuto attraverso le sue opere, il gusto per la ricerca, la passione per l’approfondimento, il desiderio di allargare gli orizzonti. Per sentirsi coinvolti e protagonisti del tempo.
Prima parte con la scrittrice Dacia Maraini, Maria Pia Simonetti, giornalista e consulente editoriale, Franco Marcoaldi, scrittore, poeta e curatore dei Meridiani Mondadori “Pellegrino in Asia” dedicati a Fosco Maraini e Giorgio Amitrano, professore di letteratura giapponese e di lingua e cultura del Giappone all’Università Orientale di Napoli e direttore dell’Istituto Italiano di cultura di Tokyo.
Seconda parte con Francesco Paolo Campione, direttore del Museo delle Culture di Lugano e curatore dell'esposizione "L'immagine dell'empresente", lo scrittore Carlo Magris, l’artista e compositore Stefano Bollani e il Prof. Daniele Baglioni, Direttore del Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici dell’Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia.
