photo exibition 2017

In festa: celebrating Italian folklore festivals

This exhibition has been created for Dialogues on Man by a master of contemporary photography as a way of expanding on the theme of culture, especially popular culture in Italy. Sixty black and white photographs taken by Gianni Berengo Gardin between 1956 and 2009, illustrate Italian society, its rites and transformations, carefully documenting not just our country’s social and cultural landscape, but also specific major and minor changes it has gone through. The display represents a small, wonderful photographic atlas of folklore festivals telling the tale of ancient customs and traditions from all Italy’s different regions, simultaneously combining an ethnographical approach with tender curiosity. A kind of “dual scrutiny” in the Ernesto De Martino style, a round trip towards “the other”. The result is a fascinating world populated with children, gipsies, women young and old dressed in their finery, dancers of all ages, where local fairs tell the story of Italy “making merry”, where everyone expresses their own culture and history through rites both old and new. The essence of these festivities is constantly and perceptively captured by this anthropologist who has chosen to be a photographer.