Qualsiasità at the Italian Cultural Institute in London
Category
ExhibitionTuesday May 16 2017 at the Italian Cultural Institute in London opens Qualsiasità, curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva and first exhibition of the Malaspina Foundation, a new experimental platform for research on contemporary photography.
The Malaspina Foundation has chosen to inaugurate its cultural activities with an exhibition project dedicated to the photographic research of Guido Guidi and to a new generation of artists witnesses of his particular attitude to the exploration of the landscape.
Qualsiasità [translator’s note: term used by Cesare Zavattini to indicate the ordinary or mundane aspects of everyday life], compares various surveys undertaken in the territory of Romagna since 1984, through the eyes of seven photographers – Cesare Ballardini, Cesare Fabbri, Jonathan Frantini, Marcello Galvani, Guido Guidi, Francesco Neri and Luca Nostri – who, with more than eighty photographs, recount the Italian province between Cesena and Ravenna passing by Faenza, Fusignano, Lugo e Massa Lombarda.
The title of the exhibition is loosely based on a quote by Cesare Zavattini, multifaceted figure and voice of Italian Neorealism. The “qualsiasità” of the eye – says the exhibition’s curator Alessandro Dandini de Sylva – is translated into a photograph of the day-to-day, attentive to the minor aspects of the area and devoted to the landscape of the immediate vicinity, taken as the prime observation point. The documentary style of the photographs on display allows them to offer an accurate and anti-rhetorical description of places considered marginal by the official iconography. It is an Italian geography that, just a few years later, is already of inestimable historical value due to the rapidly changing landscape.
The show is part of the Photo London’s Public Programme and will open at the ICI on Tuesday May 16 2017 at 7pm.
Qualsiasità
The Italian Cultural Institute
39 Belgrave Square SW1X 8NX
May 16 – June 18 2017