Friday June 24 2016 at the historic Palazzo Malaspina in Ascoli Piceno opens Qualsiasità, the first exhibition curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva at 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 in two chapters 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.
The first chapter, 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 chosen for this first 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 second chapter of the Malaspina Foundation project will be the exhibition Per una fenomenologia dei paesaggi ordinari delle Marche [For a phenomenology of ordinary landscapes of Marche region] which will open in November and will present the results of a recent photography campaign made by Guido Guidi together with Mariano Andreani, Andrea and Luisa Pertoldeo Siotto, with the aim of monitoring the landscapes transformations ongoing in the Marche region.
The aim of Malaspina Foundation (chaired by Marchesa Laura Federica Peslauser Malaspina and directed by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva) is to promote contemporary photography and contribute to the cultural development of the Marche region nationally and internationally – says the vice-president Carlo Giusti Luigi Fontana. Amongst other activities of the Foundation are scheduled artist residencies, lectures, publications and the creation of a permanent collection and a contemporary photography library.
The Foundation’s activities will allow Ascoli Piceno’s monumental Palazzo Malaspina, of great architectural and artistic interest, to be reopened to the public.
The exhibition has been made with the support of the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione and with the patronage of the Comune di Ascoli Piceno Medaglia d’oro al Valor Militare per Attività Partigiana.