MATERA IMAGINED / MATERA IMMAGINATA. Photography and a Southern Italian Town.

After the success of Rome, the exhibition MATERA IMAGINED / MATERA IMMAGINATA opens its doors. Photography and a Southern Italian Town, curated by Lindsay Harris and realized by the American Academy in Rome in collaboration with the Pole Museum of Basilicata and the support of the Matera – Basilicata Foundation 2019, who wanted to bring to Matera the exhibition that restores the construction of the image of Matera after World War II through the gaze of photography that contributes to shaping, in those special years, the fate of the City of Stones.

Matera, national shame for the tragic conditions of life in the Sassi, as “revealed” by Carlo Levi’s denunciation, becomes – thanks to the Marshall plan and the illuminated vision of excellent protagonists of that season of new meridionalism [from Adriano Olivetti to Manlio Rossi Doria to Rocco Mazzarone to Friedrich Georg Friedmann to name just a few] – an extraordinary laboratory of urban and social thought and planning. The city of the Sassi, with its contradictions, its thousand-year beauty and above all its immediate humanity [this is recorded by all photographers and photojournalists who reach it in the immediate post-war period, driven by a “strong inclination towards sociology”] breaks in as a privileged place in the meridional debate of those years, national and international. Together with economists, social scientists, urban planners and architects, anthropologists and writers, even artists and especially photographers converge in Matera and confront the special context of the ancient rock city, symbol of the backwardness of the south and early of the southern question, helping to found its image, then crystallized by the emptying of the old neighborhoods.

But Matera, the city of the overthrow from dystopia to utopia, which has been able to turn its fate as a disgrace to the world heritage of humanity, today is European Capital of Culture in the name of all the South because the expression of the meeting between conservation and innovation, between future and remote, between roots and paths, also because it has been able to put back into the process, bringing together conservation and innovation [social, cultural, digital], that image, never predictable, never just news or documentation, always full of life and humanity, like the photographs on display, which cover fifty years of history, tell beautifully, looking clearly at the future, open and shared, as the children of the Sassi, survivors of pain, foreshadowed already in the fifties.

On display are forty-six photographs taken during the last 70 years and mainly in the immediate post-war period [twenty-nine] by some of the most important authors who have dealt with the rock context of Matera and in general with the rural Basilicata. Among them, in addition to the founders of Magnum Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, Emmet Gowin and other American photojournalists linked to the great photo agency, including some women photographers like Esther Bubley and Marjory Collins, also Italian photographers like Fosco Maraini , among the first to reach Matera at the turn of the fifties. The selection of Harris also includes other great authors, such as Piergiorgio Branzi and Luigi Ghirri, in addition to friends Mario Carbone [whose Polo Museale acquired a substantial fund on the occasion of the great exhibition on the Gospel according to Matteo di Pasolini], Mario Cresci [ he spent over twenty years in Basilicata and to whom Palazzo Lanfranchi dedicated the last chapter of a major retrospective in 2011], and Augusto Viggiano [whose rich photographic archive was recently acquired by the Municipality of Matera with the intent of start the recognition of “cultural interest”].

The exhibition re-reads the construction of the image of the city. From his identity of the past, tragically immobile, as Levi narrates to his new role as a cultural reference and model of the Mediterranean heritage.

In the exhibition itinerary, the first images, at the turn of the ’40s and’ 50s, are those contemporary to the Marshall plan and the urban project of La Martella, promoted by Adriano Olivetti. In this moment, the idea of ​​a social use of photography takes shape in the United States and in Europe. On this drive towards modernization came David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson, both founders of the Magnum, and then the reporter Marjory Collins, Esther Bubley and Dan Weiner.

In the 50s and 60s for Italian photographers, such as Piergiorgio Branzi, Fosco Maraini and Mario Carbone, Matera is also the symbol of a national identity to be reconstructed, starting from the South: their anthropological, as well as political, look social.

Even in the face of the progressive abandonment of the Sassi, initiated at the end of the fifties, the uninhabited site of Matera has met a new interest in the photographic objective since the ’70s, this time addressed to the cognitive and expressive potential that the city arouses in artist. This is the case of the materano Augusto Viggiano, but also of Emmet Gowin, Mario Cresci and Luigi Ghirri.

The most recent works on show, created by the artist Carrie Mae Weems and architect Yasmin Vobis together with the scholar Joseph Williams, during their stay in Italy as scholarship holders of the American Academy in Rome, recount “the return” to the Sassi and the opening of a new phase for the cultural heritage of Matera.

All these images, for the first time together, make up a narrative not only of the heritage of Matera and its history. “These representations also highlight the issues that have defined the modern age, for better or for worse: the power struggles between the culture of the north and the south and between the urban and rural environment, the feared disappearance of the traditional customs and beliefs in the face of technology, the persistence of faith in a world increasingly defined by rationalism, the challenges launched by the creation of a united Europe and, finally, the fascination exercised by photography on individuals of any social background as a means to tell these and other stories through images. In their hands, the camera affirmed the ability of Matera to represent the very foundations of what makes us human “, writes the curator in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition.