Palau dedicates a retrospective to photographer Fausto Giaccone

As part of the XXXIII edition of the International Festival Islands That Speak, the retrospective Sardinia and Other Continents (1967-1977) dedicated to photographer Fausto Giaccone (San Vincenzo, 1943), a witness to half a century of history, will be held at the Palau Territory Documentation Center from September 5 to 30, 2019.

About seventy black and white images, taken in Italy and abroad, will be exhibited, with prints, from negative and digital, of various sizes. In addition to presenting some unpublished shots, the exhibition will be divided into a path that will present the most important works from the first ten years of the photographer’s career, the years of the most fervent passion, of a “militant” photojournalism and closely linked to the chronicle of the restlessness of that period.

The exhibition will address two different themes and will be enriched by another body of nine works from Macondo, the world of Gabriel García Márquez made in 2010.

In the works made in Sardinia on four separate trips between 1968 and 1976, Giaccone documents specific aspects of the island, local historical movements that link unequivocally to what was happening throughout the Western world in that decade (1968/1977). In the selection presented in Palau, the image of an island in transition emerges distinctly, in which traditional customs and traditions, still very much present, are intertwined with the elements of strong change characteristic of that era.

The images tell of tensions and social unease, of strong revolutionary political commitment, of protests linked to Sardinian specificity (the ’68 in Barbagia, in Orgosolo, Orune, Bono and Nuoro), of the red autumn of the shepherds, but also of an industrial colonization that began badly with the SIR in Porto Torres photographed in 1969, less than ten years before the plant’s closure that would leave behind an environmental and social catastrophe.

At the same time, however, in two separate reportages made in 1975 Giaccone tells us about two very important community moments: the Regional Horse Fair in San Leonardo de Siete Fuentes, and a shearing in Testone, near Nuoro, in which the very strong bond that the island maintains with its agro-pastoral culture shines through.

It is precisely from the land that the common thread linking Sardinia to other continents restarts. In Sicily with the 20-year commemoration of the Portella della Ginestra massacre (1967) and in the images of the Belice earthquake (1968), in Jordan with the images of the fedayins of the Popular Front for Palestinian Liberation (1968), in Portugal with the peasant occupations of the Ribatejo latifundia the year after the Carnation Revolution (1975), and finally with some images from Bolivia (1976) and in particular a ceremony in Tiahuanaco in honor of Pacha Mama (Mother Earth). In the summer of 1970, in Great Britain, Giaccone tries to tell the story of the epochal transformation that goes through the country in that short span of time, showing aspects of the more traditional London and the images made among the 600,000 young people who invaded theIsle of Wight for the last edition of the music festival. Finally, still the land, with Bolivian miners in Potosi: a gateway to the Macondo section.

In Macondo, Giaccone’s gaze on Colombia departs from a classic photojournalistic slant and follows his own personal path that delves into the world of the great writer, into the places of his life and those of his novels, becoming a story in images "of that humble and minute microcosm that surrounded me and in which, nevertheless, I recognized without a shadow of a doubt the grand allegory of universal history that had so fascinated me in One Hundred Years of Solitude."

The retrospective is curated by Fausto Giaccone and Nanni Angeli.

Free admission.

Image: Fausto Giaccone, Sardinia, worker at SIR in Porto Torres (1969).

Palau dedicates a retrospective to photographer Fausto Giaccone

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