An edition of Brescia Photo Festival entirely dedicated to cultural heritage gets underway

It kicks off on May 8, and will end on October 17, 2021, the fourth edition of Brescia Photo Festival, an initiative curated by Renato Corsini and promoted by the City of Brescia and Fondazione Brescia Musei with the collaboration of MaCof - Center of Italian Photography. There are several points of interest this year. Meanwhile, the 2021 festival celebrates the return to Brescia of the Winged Victory, one of the most extraordinary bronze statues from the Roman era, after two years of restoration. And then, there is a rich program of exhibitions and photographic events entirely dedicated to cultural, archaeological and historical heritages interpreted through the lens of authors such as Elio Ciol, Donata Pizzi, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Maurizio Galimberti, Giovanni Gastel, Franco Fontana, Federico Veronesi and many others.

This year’s theme is in fact Patrimoni and is connected precisely to the celebrations for the return of the Winged Victory to Brescia. The new placement of the statue in the eastern hall of the Capitolium, in a museum setting designed by Spanish architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg, enhances the entire archaeological area of Brixia. Archaeological Park of Roman Brescia, on the tenth anniversary of the UNESCO recognition of the site The Lombards in Italy. The Places of Power (568-774 A.D.) and is a prelude to the cultural journey that, in 2023, will consecrate Brescia as the Italian Capital of Culture with Bergamo.

The Brescia Photo Festival, initiated by the Brescia Musei Foundation, chaired by Francesca Bazoli and directed by Stefano Karadjov, will have its fulcrum in the Santa Giulia Museum and will spread with important exhibitions in various city venues, such as the Museo delle Armi “Luigi Marzoli,” MO.CA, the Contemporary Space, the Civic Museum of Natural History, the Brescia Poliambulanza Foundation, and the art galleries of the city and province, featuring some of the most important masters of photography, from Gianni Berengo Gardin to Ferdinando Scianna, from Francesco Cito to Franco Fontana, from Elio Ciol to Donata Pizzi, and many others, who will interpret with the photographic medium the cultural, archaeological, historical and social value of identity heritages, from Roman antiquity to contemporaneity.

Alfred Seiland, Tadmor, Palmyra, Syria, 2011

Gianni Berengo Gardin, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, 2019

Brescia Photo Festival exhibitions

The itinerary among the venues of the Brescia Photo Festival starts from the Museum of Santa Giulia, in the renovated exhibition spaces of “Renaissance Quadrilateral” of the high galleries of the Monastery of Santa Giulia, the subject of a recent functional recovery financed by a Lombardy Region Call for Proposals with the “Off\On” project, which has allowed Brescia to enrich itself with a unique monumental and patrimonial space, perhaps the most extensive and complete for temporary exhibitions owned by a city public museum. In these entirely renovated rooms, from May 8 to October 17, 2021, the most anticipated event of this edition, the exhibition Alfred Seiland. IMPERIVM ROMANVM. Photographs 2005-2020, the first Italian retrospective of Austrian photographer Alfred Seiland (Sankt Michael, Austria, 1952), which comes to Italy after its success at the Roman Germanic Museum in Cologne, Rencontres in Arles and the Albertina in Vienna. The exhibition, curated by Filippo Maggia and Francesca Morandini, organized by Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Municipality of Brescia, and co-produced by Skira, presents for the first time in Italy 136 large-format images, the result of a 15-year work that Alfred Seiland has carried out around the mythical places of Romanity, reinterpreted in surprising and unexpected ways. A central part of the selection is a nucleus of 20 previously unseen images including a portfolio of 6 shots taken in Brescia between 2019 and 2020, capturing the city’s ancient heritage and documenting its monumental and social value, constantly changing according to contemporary canons, accompanied by an in-depth video interview.

Fascinated in fact by the “cinematic” sets of ancient Rome, set up at Cinecittà, Alfred Seiland undertook a long journey to the territories where Rome’s rule extended, from Syria to Scotland and beyond, to photograph the buildings built by the Romans and capture the different nuances of interaction between man and ruins. The exhibition stands as an ideal bridge between historical heritage and the present-day gaze in keeping with the identity of the multi-year project dedicated to the celebration and enhancement of Winged Victory. Forty countries are told by their archaeological sites such as Palmyra, Samaria or Epidaurus. The project aims to illustrate, with sometimes hyperrealist and pop, sometimes symbolist and minimalist photographs, the inextricable and vital relationship between the remaining traces of Roman culture and the places of modernity. The public is thus invited to discover the transformations of the cities and the landscape: the photographer’s eye is meant to enhance their conscious or casual reuse, and to expose the surreal dialogue between ancient monumental glories and modern urban fabrics, the spaces of mass tourism, sports and leisure culture. The Colosseum in Rome, the Baths in Bath, the Pont du Gard in Provence, but also ruins of sites less known to the general public, reference for small communities or totally misrepresented territories or, again, hyperrealist modern buildings that allude to the ancient in all their paradox, such as the Cinecittà set for a British drama set in ancient Rome or the Caesar Palace in Las Vegas or the discreet presence of archaeological remains in the current urban fabric. The monuments of the Roman Empire, spread throughout Europe and along the Mediterranean basin, constitute a visual habit for its inhabitants, a fetish for tourists, and an obstacle for infrastructure. The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Italian and English catalog published by Skira.

The exhibition at the Santa Giulia Museum continues, from May 8 to October 17, 2021, with Palmyra. A memory denied, curated by Renato Corsini, the reportage by Friulian photographer Elio Ciol, consisting of 20 shots, taken in 2015 in Syria before the destruction inflicted by ISIS on one of humanity’s most precious treasures. The exhibition is accompanied by an architectural and urban planning focus curated by Alberto Ferlenga, rector of the IUAV in Venice and full professor of architectural design, dedicated to the first pictorial representation of Palmyra in 1691, the monumental View of Palmyra by Dutch painter Hofstede van Hessen, preserved at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam.

“It is part of the nature of cities,” Alberto Ferlenga, Rector of the IUAV University of Venice, interjects, “to exchange in space and time architectural and urban forms, some of them, however, express this attitude to the highest degree by developing true parallel lives. The relationship between Palmyra and St. Petersburg is of this kind. For Peter the Great Palmyra was among the models given to architects for the foundation of his city; Later the relationship was strengthened through the dissemination of prints and books. In the mid-nineteenth century Carlo Rossi renewed it by designing theaters and squares, and finally it came up again in the early part of the new century with the discovery of the ”Palmyrene tariff“ by Russian archaeologists. Coming to the present day, it is perhaps no coincidence that it was again the Russians who liberated Palmyra from Isis by celebrating the event with a momentous concert by the St. Petersburg orchestra in the city’s Roman theater.”

More exhibitions: Donata Pizzi, with Rome in Africa, from May 8 to Oct. 17, 2021, curated by Renato Corsini, recounts through 29 photographs the suggestions of the ancient cities of North Africa, including deserts and Roman ruins. The journey led the artist from Cyrene in Libya, through Timgad and Djemila in the Kabylia region, Tipasa along the Algerian coast, Dougga, Thuburbo Maius, Sbeitla and the great coliseum of El Djem in Tunisia, and again to Sabratha and Leptis Magna. To translate into an intimate image that light, those immense distances, Donata Pizzi attempted to reduce the photographic medium to a minimum, using a small panoramic camera, with a simple standard lens, as if looking through the slit of the Tuareg’s turban.

Then there is the exhibition Eros, curated by Clelia Belgrado, which presents from May 8 to October 17, 2021, 25 photographs of sculptures that Reggio Emilia artist Bruno Cattani took inside museums, revealing the unseen side of classical works. As Benedetta Donato writes: “Eros collects the years of passionate investigations and fascinating journeys in the universe of sculpture, in which the author has been able to intercept and shape those obscure and hidden aspects of desire, which finally reveal themselves, thanks to a gaze capable of capturing instincts and drives, [...] in figurations of strong visual impact, like vigorous bodies, endowed with deep vitality.”

Finally, as an ideal conclusion to the fourth edition of the Brescia Photo Festival, from September 21 to October 17, 2021, "With Love and Greatest Care. The Restoration of the Albumen of the Church of Miracles, by Giacomo Rossetti, curated by Roberta D’Adda. Awarded at the Vienna Industrial Exhibition of 1873, Rossetti’s work was purchased by the City of Brescia in 1903 and is part of the collection of the Photographic Archive of the Civic Museums of Art and History, which was established in parallel with the development of the museum collections and has had its own records since 1935. The restoration is made possible by a grant from the Photography Strategy 2020 call of the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity (DGCC) of the MiC.

Federico Veronesi, Portrait of Tim, 2010

Giovanni Gastel, Bellissima

The widespread itinerary in the city

Thespread itinerary in the city of the 4th Brescia Photo Festival continues at the Museo delle Armi “Luigi Marzoli,” in the Brescia Castle, which hosts, from May 8 to October 17, 2021, the exhibition Vita da centurioni, curated by Renato Corsini. The exhibition documents, through 36 set and backstage photographs, as well as 6 original posters, the myths, legends, adventures and vicissitudes of the heroes of Peplum, one of the most prolific genres of Italian cinema, recounting the invention of centurions and gladiators in postwar films and revising in an often ironic and irreverent form the myth of the Roman military.

The MO.CA - Center for New Cultures hosts three exhibitions: the first, È Brescia, curated by Albano Morandi, presents from May 8 to July 31, 2021 seven great Italian photographers (Gianni Berengo Gardin, Francesco Cito, Franco Fontana, Gianni Pezzani, Ferdinando Scianna, Luca Gilli) who tell Brescia and its cultural excellences with their lens. The second, an exhibition-tribute dedicated to the return of Winged Victory: Bellissima. 20 photographers overwhelmed by an unusual splendor. Curated by Mario Trevisan, it proposes from May 8 to June 27, 2021 the works of more than twenty photographers, among the most important of the Italian scene, such as Silvia Camporesi, Renato Corsini, Maurizio Galimberti, Giovanni Gastel and other artists, who have decided to work on this extraordinary sculpture, a sort of “Muse” of the 2021 photographic review. Finally, Federico Fellini / "behind the scenes," curated by Renato Corsini, from June 29 to July 31, 2021 bears witness to the work of Federico Fellini: alongside some posters of his best-known films, a more private Fellini than his official image linked to the role of director is told through about 50 shots, taken by Sandro Becchetti, Tazio Secchiaroli, Dufoto Agency.

Spazio Contemporanea welcomes the exhibition Le cattedrali del lavoro, curated by Renato Corsini and Paolo Conforti, with the support of Fondazione ASM, from May 8 to June 13, 2021, in which the shots of Matteo and Stefano Rodella (Bams Photo), accompany the visitor to the places of industrial archeology in Brescia and its province, which arose in the immediate postwar period, documenting some extraordinary witnesses of industrial development, capable of making us reflect on an economic and social history that characterized strong urban metamorphoses. “Fondazione ASM’s commitment to supporting the Brescia Photo Festival continues,” intervenes Felice Scalvini, ASM Foundation President, “by collaborating in this edition in the creation of the exhibition The Cathedrals of Labor, which documents, with images of great visual impact, the places of industrial archaeology of which our city is particularly rich and solicits feelings of both pride and nostalgia for real monuments of labor.”

Also at Spazio Contemporanea, curated by Renato Corsini and Albano Morandi, will be 1921/2021. Homage to Joseph Beuys: portraits, photographic sequences and setting shots (June 16-July 31, 2021), executed by Renato Corsini during the historic interview that art critic Pierre Restany did with the artist in 1980, and collected in an exhibition of great iconographic and cultural value, on the centenary of Joseph Beuys’ birth.

The defense of wildlife heritage is the subject of Federico Veronesi ’s investigation with his reportage conducted in Africa. The Wildlife exhibition, curated by Carolina Zani, on display at the Civic Museum of Natural Sciences from May 14 to August 29, 2021, features a series of large-scale photographs of Africa’s most fascinating mammals.

At Fondazione Poliambulanza from May 8 to September 26, 2021, the first stage of a traveling exhibition entitled Mirabili radici. The UNESCO Site of Brescia in the Photographs of Alessandra Chemollo, curated by Alessandra Chemollo and Francesca Morandini, with images of places recognized as UNESCO heritage sites in 2011, such as the Monumental Complex of Santa Giulia, before and during the retrospective dedicated to the architect and artist Juan Navarro Baldeweg, the Capitolium, during and at the conclusion of the realization of the new layout of the eastern cell with the restored Winged Victory, the Domus and the Republican Sanctuary. “In such a context,” stresses Mario Taccolini, President Poliambulanza of Brescia, “it is not surprising that the ideal passion, of generous dedication, of daily sacrifice and self-sacrifice, of professional industriousness, of intelligent and qualified expertise, the artistic expression of the work of art declines a timeless humanism, a culture of proximity, a vocation and a solidarity attitude that has always accompanied the experience of our Hospital Institute.”

On display at the Mille Miglia Museum, from May 21 to July 18, 2021, will be 60 photographs by Giacomo Bretzel chronicling the Mille Miglia race over the past two decades. The author communicates the feeling of speed with the use of several different styles, resulting in a photographic texture that adds the power and allure of a bygone era to the images. “The Mille Miglia Museum is very proud,” says director Maria Bussolati, “to host part of the collections of the prestigious Brescia Photo Festival. In particular, we are proud to welcome in our halls the shots of Giacomo Bretzel, the artist of photography, who, thanks to his passion for vintage cars, evidenced by his assiduous participation in the Red Arrow, has fixed with his view camera on 60 photos - 15 silver salt prints and 45 fine art prints - twenty years of the most beautiful race in the world. I would add that, with this initiative, the Museum confirms its vocation to open itself to the artistic, cultural and social fabric of the city, for the benefit of the entire community.”

At LABA, at the Via Don Vender location, the Humanitas exhibition will be on view from May 13 to July 31, 2021, organized by students of the Photography department who have developed and highlighted through research and personal sensitivity the importance of heritage declined in its infinite forms. “The theme of the Brescia Photo Festival, Patrimonies, could only be interpreted by our students, our heritage, of LABA and of the city,” intervenes Gianluca Delbarba, president CDA LABA. “We have set up an exhibition in one of our locations, the one in Via Don Vender, which tells about those intangible assets that are also passed down from generation to generation through stories and testimonies. These are fundamental goods that have shaped identities, linking different historical phases, showing us in a clear way the sense of evolution that rests on dialogue, on mutual respect, which only knowledge can guarantee. It is one of the commitments that LABA also wants to make to its city to give Brescians tools that will help them appreciate the beauty that surrounds them and make shared heritage.”

Still, the fourth edition of the Brescia Photo Festival also expands its horizons to the province of Brescia. At the Municipal Library in Vobarno, Valle Sabbia, big trees are the protagonists of Gianni Pezzani’s exhibition Humus, curated by Andrea Tinterri, who fixes the heritage of Italian forests in his photos in search of an enchanted nature (May 15-September 30, 2021). At the Vittorio Leonesio Foundation in Puegnago sul Garda, the exhibition Sipario - please turn on your phones, the show is about to begin by Nicola Bertellotti (June 23-September 26, 2021) focuses his poetics on the sense of transience that envelops abandoned places crystallized in a static time.

As per tradition, Brescia Photo Festival will offer the PHOTO FRIENDS schedule where art galleries, bookstores, libraries and the network of downtown boutiques will open to host exhibition interventions, focuses, lectures and thematic editorial proposals. The collaboration project with art galleries is curated by Albano Morandi, who points out that “also this year, thanks to the collaboration of associations and private galleries and thanks to the coordination of the Cultural Department of the Municipality of Brescia, the core of ”Friends“ will be nourished with as many as 10 exhibitions in which the theme of the festival is extraordinarily illustrated through languages and themes among the most varied and disparate.”

The new edition of the Brescia Photo Festival is as usual the occasion for a series of events dedicated to all photography enthusiasts: guided tours, family activities, meetings with authors, exceptional guides, and screenings dedicated to the New Eden, which will animate the exhibitions set up in the Santa Giulia Museum. The visual identity of the Brescia Photo Festival IV edition is developed by Studio Tassinari Vetta, already the author of the Winged Victory visual campaign.

Renato Corsini, Joseph Beuys, 1980

Donata Pizzi, Thysdrus, Tunisia

The statements

“Brescia, a city of art and culture, once again opens its doors to great art photography,” says Emilio Del Bono, mayor of Brescia. “Never as in these days, still unfortunately characterized by the difficulties caused by the health emergency, do we feel the need for beauty, the desire to return to places dedicated to art and culture, the need to reappropriate the spaces of our great historical and artistic heritage. ”Patrimony“ is, in fact, the title given to this year’s festival. A theme as fitting and topical as ever to reread, in the light of the photographic medium, our historical and cultural identity.”

“A city and its important historical and artistic legacy, the interpretation offered by the gaze and the lens of the most important names in Italian and international photography, an exhibition itinerary that winds its way through dozens of venues, a network of collaborations involving public and private,” says deputy mayor and culture councillor Laura Castelletti: “this edition of the Brescia Photo Festival confirms itself as one of the leading events in the city’s cultural programming, a project that is still young but has immediately become great. Our city can boast and enjoy an exceptional archaeological, historical, artistic and landscape heritage; our commitment and, I believe, today also our success, is to take care of it and enhance it in the best possible way. A commitment and an achievement that sees not only the Municipality and the Foundation working in concert, but also many other realities and subjects. A choral momentum that makes us look forward to 2023 with increasing enthusiasm.”

“Combining and bringing together the creativity of photographers with the need to document the archaeological, natural and cultural HERITAGE of our civilization was the great challenge imposed by the theme of this fourth edition of the Brescia Photo Festival,” says Renato Corsini, artistic curator of the Brescia Photo Festival. “The result was an artistic journey of great interest and rich in food for thought that found particularly fertile ground in the comparison between the different styles with which the authors approached the representation of the same subject: an open window on the relationship between the figurative arts and their expressive language.”

Francesca Bazoli, President of Fondazione Brescia Musei, points out that “the Brescia Photo Festival 2021 acquires in this fourth edition an emblematic dimension with respect to the strategic planning of Fondazione Brescia Musei and to the path we have set since 2019, with reference to the great palimpsest dedicated to archaeology and the resemantization of archaeological heritage in contemporary form. In this case, moreover, the anniversary of the ten-year Unesco anniversary for our Brescia Longobarda site, which falls on June 25, right during the holding of the Brescia Photo Festival, allows us to recall with the theme of ”heritages“ the great encyclopedic legacy of an extraordinary city like Brescia in which the Municipality and the Foundation are reinterpreting the historical artistic and monumental heritage under the banner of modernity.”

Stefano Karadjov, director of Fondazione Brescia Musei observes, “We are restarting in Brescia after the pause caused by the epidemic that in 2020 prevented the realization of what is now a long-awaited kermesse for the world of Italian photography. An event entitled to the concept of heritage and the use that photography as a great twentieth-century medium has made of the archaeological, monumental and artistic testimonies of the past and of the naturalistic and landscape dimension of our ecosystems. An event that is strongly integrated with the Vittoria Alata Brescia 2020 schedule with which the city of Brescia, also with the Photo Festival, aims to launch a new contemporary identity that is alive and design-creative for the great legacies of the past that abound in our country and of which the recently redeveloped archaeological area of Roman Brescia is a national emblem.”

Alfred Seiland, The Corinth Canal, Isthmia, Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis, Greece, 2014

Elio Ciol, Palmyra, Via Colonnata, horse and boys, March 29, 1996

The program of the fourth edition of Brescia Photo Festival - Patrimoni

Alfred Seiland. IMPERIVM ROMANVM. Photographs 2005-2020
Brescia, Museum of Santa Giulia
May 8-October 17, 2021

Palmyra. A memory denied by Elio Ciol
Brescia, Museum of Santa Giulia
May 8-October 17, 2021

Rome in Africa by Donata Pizzi
Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia
May 8-October 17, 2021

Eros by Bruno Cattani
Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia
May 8-October 17, 2021

“With Love and Greatest Care”
The restoration of the albumen of the Church of Miracles, by Giacomo Rossetti
Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia
September 21 - October 17, 2021

Life as centurions
Brescia, Museum of Arms “Luigi Marzoli”
May 8-October 17, 2021

Bellissima. 20 photographers overwhelmed by unusual splendor
Brescia, MO.CA
May 8-June 27, 2021

It’s Brescia
Brescia, MO.CA
May 8 - July 31, 2021

Federico Fellini / “behind the scenes”
Brescia, MO.CA
June 29-July 31, 2021

The cathedrals of work by Matteo and Stefano Rodella (Bams Photo)
Brescia, Spazio Contemporanea
May 8-June 13, 2021

1921/2021. Homage to Joseph Beuys
Brescia, Spazio Contemporanea
June 16-July 31, 2021

Humanitas
Brescia, LABA, Via Don Vender location.
May 13-July 31, 2021

Wildlife by Federico Veronesi
Brescia, Museo Civico di Scienze Naturali
May 14 - August 29, 2021

Marvelous Roots. The UNESCO site of Brescia in the photographs of Alessandra Chemollo
Brescia, Fondazione Poliambulanza
May 8-September 26, 2021

Mille Miglia. The Image of a Myth by Giacomo Bretzel
Brescia, Mille Miglia Museum
May 21-July 18, 2021

Humus by Gianni Pezzani
Vobarno, Municipal Library
May 15 - September 30, 2021

Curtain - please turn on your phones, the show is about to begin by Nicola Bertellotti
Vittorio Leonesio Foundation Puegnago sul Garda
June 23-September 26, 2021

An edition of Brescia Photo Festival entirely dedicated to cultural heritage gets underway

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