The Galerie l’Entrepôt in Monaco invites us on a journey to the heart of Sicily, this Italian region where faith is etched into the marble of monuments and especially in the hearts of Sicilians.
Ferdinando Scianna invites us back to the sixties. The visitor will thus browse through the memory of this people, captured and frozen in photographs. Make no mistake, the artist did not succumb to nostalgia; indeed, when you take a photo, it is the present moment and you are driven by no nostalgia, but rather by an aesthetic reflex, struck by the beauty, the unusual, or the epic character of the photographed scene.
This Italian photographer, pardon, Sicilian, opens his album, his memory, and we contemplate these scenes of life, faith, processions, children, women, streets, churches, and the most intense moment will be a child crowned with flowers, the shot taken on Good Friday. There are also the local festivals such as that of the Diavoli, the countryside, not to forget Palermo and the pilgrimage to Saint Rosalia. It is this voyage into the heart of the faith of an entire people to which we are invited.
This was Sicily, this was the past, and the exercise of memory negates all nostalgia. Ferdinando Scianna specifies: “Nostalgia is a sentiment that has always seemed soft and hypocritical to me.” The memory would be a historical exercise and the photographer adds: “Once I heard a great Jewish intellectual say that history begins when you actually realize that any return is impossible.” Ferdinando thus pays tribute to this Sicily, that of a not-so-distant past, and his photos remain its witnesses.
Upon leaving this exhibition, one will think of Italian cinema from those same years with Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli by Rossellini. Black and white once again demonstrates its superiority over color when it comes to sharing emotion. You can make this unforgettable journey to Sicily until November 9th.
Thierry Jan.
Galerie l’Entrepôt
22 rue de Millo Monaco
Visit Monday to Tuesday: 3 PM – 7 PM.
