Casale Monferrato kicks off its first biennial festival dedicated to photography

From March 25 to June 12, 2022, Casale Monferrato will host the first edition of MonFest, a biennial photography festival directed by Mariateresa Cerretelli and promoted by the City of Casale Monferrato. The theme around which the eleven planned exhibitions will be developed is The Forms of Time. From Francesco Negri to the contemporary. Indeed, time becomes the silent protagonist of the shots on display but at the same time, as Mariateresa Cerretelli states, “it is an expression with which Italo Calvino defined cities. But which we extend to landscapes, to the realities of portraits and to the creativity expressed by the photographers who will be exhibited here.”

Various locations will be involved in MonFest: the Castle, the Theater, the Cathedral, the Synagogue and Palazzo Gozzani Treville, where the Philharmonic Academy is based.

This first edition kicks off with the exhibition Homage to Francesco Negri, curated by Luigi Mantovani and Elisa Costanzo and to be held in the Castle. A lawyer, mayor of Casale Monferrato from 1881 to 1888, Francesco Negri was above all a great photographer known for his activity as an experimenter. We are fully immersed in the scientific, technological, artistic, cultural, and social world from the second half of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century. The microphotographs, stereoscopies, trichromes, as well as the telephoto lens he patented, allow us to look at the world of the visible and invisible in an innovative way for that era.

Photographs by three well-known authors, Lisetta Carmi, Valentina Vannicola and Silvia Camporesi, will be on display.

Lisetta Carmi will be featured in the exhibition Journey to Israel and Palestine, curated by Daria Carmi and Giovanni Battista Martini. In the spaces of the Synagogue of Casale Monferrato, numerous unpublished shots taken in Israel during Lisetta’s two stays in 1962 and 1967 will be on view: here the photographer captured the complex reality of which the new State of Israel was made up. A state where coexistence among the various components of its people was constantly being tested.

Completely different is the work of Valentina Vannicola and her Living Layers, curated by Mariateresa Cerretelli, hosted in the Castle. One of Italy’s leading representatives of staged photography, the photographer has reinterpreted the territory of Rome’s VI Municipality by resorting to tableaux vivants in which the city loses its natural references of space and time, taking on a symbolic, almost dreamlike significance.

Silvia Camporesi, on the other hand, has created with her Domestica a human and personal diary, a fantastic tale of everyday life. Curated by Benedetta Donato, and winner of the Storie di donne (Stories of women ) competition organized by Soroptimist, her photos were born within the photographer’s home walls in the days of the first lockdown. Her shots will be on view at the Philharmonic Academy at Palazzo Gozzani Treville, along with a video projection curated by Stefano Marchino honoring the finalists of the Storie di donne competition and a group show curated by Ilenio Celoria entitled Guardarsi per rinascere. Female portraits and self-portraits. Starring students from the Leardi Institute and the Morbelli High School of Art who created a series of self-portraits during the first lockdown of 2020.

Also curated by Mariateresa Cerretelli and with the collaboration of Rome’s Dadaeast Gallery, the Cathedral of St. Evasius will host Tribute to Leonardo by Maurizio Galimberti, who reinterprets the Last Supper by Vinciano by displaying it in the church atrium.

Gabriele Basilico nel Monferrato, curated by Andrea Elia Zanini at the Castle, presents a selection of the photographs taken in 2006: Casale, Alessandria, Ovada, and Tortona are the protagonists of portraits that tell of the squares, architecture and alleys of the Monferrato towns. In 2009 it is the turn of the Po Delta, retracing the places already portrayed since the 1950s by Pietro Donzelli. Basilico’s gaze goes as far as the Adriatic.

Alexandrian Vittore Fossati will propose Il Tanaro a Masio, an exhibition curated by Giovanna Calvenzi. Corresponding to two notebooks published in 2012 and 2018, the exhibition captures the beauty of the Alessandria landscape in the deliberate simplicity of these shots.

From Piedmont to Campania, with Photographing Time, Pompeii and its Surroundings, images by Claudio Sabatino housed in Castello. A city buried and forgotten for more than 1,700 years, a metaphor for imponderable time and human vulnerability, Sabatino’s work is on the stratifications of History to reflect on the changing relationship the landscape has with the past and the present.

The World of Silvio Canini curated by Elena Ceratti in the rooms of the Castle offers a cross-section of the Romagna artist’s creative activity.

Raoul Iacometti, with #homeTOhome, narrates in the Foyer of the Municipal Theater of Casale Monferrato, dancers from around the world portrayed with cell phones in their homes in plastic positions during lockdown. Curated by Luciano Bobba, when silence still reigned in international theaters because of the pandemic, Raoul created a set in his home and in the homes of the great protagonists of international dance, and on this new virtual stage he launched his #homeTOhome project. More than forty artists are involved, including prima ballet dancers and soloists, all working in corps de ballet of some of the most important theaters located in different places around the world.

The subjects of Ilenio Celoria’s photographs, Fotomorfosi Infernot are the small underground architectures carved out of stone that, since 2014, have been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as part of “The Vineyard Landscapes of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato.” The images on display were taken with a special camera that produces 360-degree spherical images then transformed into stereographic representations. The exhibition is curated by Simona Ongarelli and will extend into the spaces of the Castle.

Finally, the photos of the thirty-four winners of the competition Da Casale al Po alle colline del Monferrato will be exhibited in a large space of the Castle curated by Paola Casulli and with video projection curated by Stefano Marchino.

Image: Valentina Vannicola, Living Layers (2012)

Casale Monferrato kicks off its first biennial festival dedicated to photography

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