It was 1977 when a group of photographers exhibited a collective work at the Quadragono Arte Gallery in Conegliano Veneto that was destined to cause long discussion: The Roles. Liliana Barchiesi, Kitti Bolognesi, Giovanna Calvenzi, Marzia Malli, Laura Rizzi, Livia Sismondi and Chiara Visconti had joined together the year before in Milan under the name of Women Photojournalist Collectivein the midst of feminist struggles. Photography was their tool to investigate the world, patriarchal legacies and their own role as artists. The aim was to undermine and make fun of gender stereotypes within photography, a field that had until then been predominantly male, contesting it from within.
Today, fifty years after the birth of the group, which then naturally dissolved to give space to solo careers, the artists meet at the Fabbrica del Vapore inside Old to whom? Longevity Forum. The photographic exhibition, scheduled from 12 June to 4 July, brings together 65 works by the Collective that question the public on “what it means to grow old, we who have grown old together”. The exhibition occupies the entire Sala delle Colonne, embracing its perimeter: the works interpenetrate each other in a continuous and seamless narrative, which gives life to a deeply shared choral tale
The journey through the works starts from the project of Liliana BarchiesiIdentity. Photographing the passage of time, beautifully summed up in the famous phrase by Anna Magnani: «Leave all my wrinkles, don’t take away even one. It took me forever to make them!». Barchesi has collected and re-presented his identity documents preserved over the years, juxtaposing them, testifying to an evolution that has no pretensions to beauty but to affirmation of identity. There is no complacency, only the testimony of a change that has the female body as its pivot. This dialogue between memory and future is also at the center of the research of Livia Sismondi: with The art of longevity, the photographer explores the path of some artists for whom time has become a strength and a creative enrichment, rather than a limit.
The theme of personal fulfillment then unfolds through the value of work. In Work as always ennobles, Kitti Bolognese explore professional activity as a search for serenity: a destination that does not end with the age of 65, but which reconfigures and adapts to the needs of changing bodies and spaces. Laura Rizzi instead enters the heart of volunteering with Schools without permission, portraying women over 65 who dedicate their lives to the literacy of migrants in Milan. His shots celebrate the protagonists of the Schools Without Permission Network, active for twenty years and already awarded the Ambrogino d’oro.
The community and social dimension also emerges in Cuccagna di Giovanna Calvenzithe story of the Milanese farmhouse of the same name where, in 1998, the Cuccagna Cooperative with the aim of creating sociality, services and bridges between cultures. A future staked on and built thanks to the fundamental contribution of women. The gaze then shifts to a more intimate dimension with Marzia Malliwhich looks at Sexitude as an inclusive category, a path to reclaim a femininity that transcends the physical barriers and prejudices of the time.
Lastly Anna Fugadocumentary maker and director of the film How we age today? (projected in a loop in the exhibition space), presents Grandma Aurora. One hundred years and not hearing them: the intimate and daily story of an “immortal” centenarian, who lives in a suggestive temporal suspension.
Old to whom? Longevity Forum it turns out to be a profoundly intimate exhibition, capable of overcoming generational boundaries. It is not only addressed to those who lived through those seasons of struggle or to those who today find themselves dealing with old age, but it speaks to everyone. Through the Collective’s shots, longevity stops being a taboo or a cone of shadow to become the mirror of an alternative and powerful story of femininity. What the artists deliver to us is a political and poetic manifesto that is still very current, which redefines the very concept of time and claims, today as fifty years ago, the freedom to be oneself. In every season of life.
