Forty years after Lisetta Carmi moved to Puglia, Lecce dedicates an anthological exhibition to her

The rooms of the Carlo V Castle in Lecce will host from May 6 to September 5, 2021 the exhibition Lisetta Carmi. The Others, curated by Roberto Lacarbonara, Giovanni Battista Martini and Alessandro Zechini.

The anthological exhibition of Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924) is being held forty years after the Ligurian photographer moved to Puglia, in Cisternino, in 1971, where she chose to live and found the International Ashram inspired by the Indian guru Babaji Herakhan Baba. On display will be more than sixty shots on the main themes of his photographic research that has always been oriented on the investigation of social marginality, labor and the territories of the South. Alongside photographs dedicated to the Port of Genoa and Italsider, there will be shots dedicated to Puglia, Sardinia and Sicily.

The photographer was among the first to deal radically withgender identity: when in 1972 her photos were collected in a book published by the Essedì publishing house in Rome, bookstores refused to display it. Lisetta Carmi had begun photographing transsexuals in Genoa in 1965 and continued for seven years until the publication of I Travestiti.

One room of the exhibition is also dedicated to one of the most significant encounters in Lisetta Carmi’s photographic experience, that with Ezra Pound. The sequence of twelve shots taken in Sant’Ambrogio di Zoagli in 1966 captures the abysmal and lost gaze of the American poet, who moved to Italy with his wife Dorothy Shakespeare after his release from St. Elizabeths asylum (Washington).

Despite her decision to abandon her work in the late 1970s, the photographer increasingly assumed an undisputed centrality in the history of Italian photography, and there are many exhibitions and publications focusing on her production: the important 2015 retrospective in Genoa, the one at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere in 2017 and at the MAN in Nuoro (2021), and her participation in the last Quadriennale in Rome (2021).

The exhibition is a project of Kunstschau and RTI Theutra Oasime of Lecce, Arte Contemporanea Picena of Ascoli Piceno in collaboration with the Lisetta Carmi Archive of Genoa, under the patronage of the Municipality of Lecce. After Lecce, the review will be hosted in the Osvaldo Licini Museum in Ascoli Piceno (September to November 2021).

For info and reservations: +39 0832 246517, email castellocarlov@gmail.com

Hours: 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 to 8 p.m.
Tickets: Full 8 euros, reduced 6 euros.

Image: Lisetta Carmi, I transvestiti, La Cabiria (1965-1970; 24 x 30 cm) © Lisetta Carmi-Martini & Ronchetti

Forty years after Lisetta Carmi moved to Puglia, Lecce dedicates an anthological exhibition to her

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