Massimo Listri's photographs in an exhibition paying homage to Kyiv, a symbol of the struggle for freedom

On Thursday, Feb. 8, the exhibition Florence-Kyiv and Back by Massimo Listri, curated by Sergio Risaliti, artistic director of the Novecento Museum in Florence, will be inaugurated in the Sala d’Arme of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence , Italy, on display until March 8, 2024.

It is an unprecedented cycle of photographic works that Listri has dedicated to the architectural and artistic beauty of Kyiv, (Kiev) where much of the historical and artistic heritage is at risk of survival. The exhibition is intended as a tribute by Florence, twinned with Ukraine’s capital, to the city, a symbol of the struggle for freedom and independence of a people militarily attacked by Russia. Twelve large-scale photographs will be printed and presented on metal frames, evoking the atmosphere of antique paintings on easels, while others will be projected on the walls of the Sala d’Arme, taking advantage of video projectors, to highlight the clear and sharp quality of photographic details, a distinctive feature of Listri, who is world-renowned for his “metaphysical” artistic views.

“It is a precise choice that Massimo Listri makes with these photos,” says Mayor Dario Nardella. “Images that at a hasty first glance are seemingly timeless and without space but that, at a closer and deeper look, reveal all the anguish that has accompanied the Russian invasion of Ukraine for two years. A huge theater with completely empty red velvet seats, hundreds of photos of women and men gathered together in a bleak collage of the fallen, eviscerated sacred places of every religion, luxurious party halls stopped before the last dance, stocks of bread ready to be distributed, covered works of art, sandbags seeking shelter from the horror. A war without protagonists and without blood, but looming in Listri’s images.”

“UNESCO,” points out curator Risaliti. “estimates more than 250 cultural buildings damaged or entirely destroyed, with an economic damage of nearly 3 billion euros. A few decades ago the same thing happened to the library in Sarajevo, a symbol of universal value and significance, as the city of Palmyra. All of us feel despoiled of something that belongs to us, because culture affirms us as human beings endowed with a higher consciousness, achieved, not by divine intervention, but thanks to art, music, everything beautiful and memorable that we have created over the centuries.”

“Massimo Listri reached Kyiv, but he did not photograph the ruins, the injured and the dead,” Risaliti continues. “He did not set out to document the horror, the despair. His reportage, as always of the highest poetic and formal quality, covers some of the major sites of the Ukrainian capital’s artistic and architectural heritage. He sought to generate contemplation, duration, projecting feelings of death through to compassion for all that is beautiful that the Ukrainian people have built over the centuries. Indeed, this new cycle of his photographs touches us deeply, moves us and leaves us somewhat dismayed. They are unquestionably beautiful, flaunting nothing but beauty, magnificence, aesthetic richness, sacredness, creative opulence, spiritual devotion. Yet, we cannot help but associate all this beauty and magnificence with the depressing, hallucinatory and suffocating presence of war, with its disasters and heavy cloak of grief.”

Massimo Listri's photographs in an exhibition paying homage to Kyiv, a symbol of the struggle for freedom

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