At the Merz Foundation a story in images of Palermo's history from the 1950s to 1992

Fondazione Merz presents from April 17 to Sept. 24, 2023, in collaboration with Letizia Battaglia International Center of Photography, the group exhibition Palermo Mon Amour. Curated by Valentina Greco, the exhibition aims to restore the history of Palermo from the 1950s to 1992 in a story through images.

The protagonists are five photographers who have investigated with different feelings thepoetic imagery of Palermo, recounting a city in continuous deflagration, and not always recomposed in its contemporary complexity. A journey that reveals, through the research and insights of Enzo Sellerio, Letizia Battaglia, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi, Lia Pasqualino an imaginative Palermo.

The subject of a gentle, playful, cultured, anti-rhetorical vision, which is also acute testimony to the social scene of the 1950s and 1960s, dense with layered situations of misery and degradation but awaiting a possible civil and economic rebirth, the city undergoes the further onslaught of the 1970s, of daily facts of fierce chronicle, until 1992, the year in which it seemed, once again, that everything could change. In the same years, the city allowed itself to be infiltrated by punk, student demonstrations, occupations, new theatrical productions, and contradictory political life, and had its resistance in the construction of an imaginary in a constant state of exception, where writing and writing for images were attentive observers and protagonists.

The exhibition project makes use of the collaboration of theLetizia Battaglia Archive and theEnzo Sellerio Archive.

Inserting itself in the framework of a long-standing dialogue that Fondazione Merz has with the Sicilian territory, Palermo Mon Amour intends to build a cross-section of a city with a troubled and contradictory history.

With the support of Regione Piemonte. Under the patronage of City of Palermo. With thanks to City of Turin and Kuhn & Bülow, Planeta. Special thanks to Patrons Fondazione Merz.

Image: Lia Pasqualino, Letizia Battaglia with a psychiatric hospital inmate, Palermo 1986

At the Merz Foundation a story in images of Palermo's history from the 1950s to 1992

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