Italian
ALTIPIANO, the journey with Mario Rigoni Stern and BELPAESE, an exhibition project dedicated to Italy, through the talented lens of great photographers, are the two cultural proposals that, thanks to great photography, the M9 Museum in Mestre will offer to its visitors starting June 5
M9 Museo del ‘900 presents ALTIPIANO. Excursions in the work and landscape of Mario Rigoni Stern, an exhibition project curated by Loïc Seron that offers a photographic investigation dedicated to the Asiago Plateau through the literary work of Mario Rigoni Stern. The exhibition is not a collection of landscape images, but an intimate dialogue between photography and literature, between the gaze of the French photographer and the vision of the Asiago writer. Loïc Seron has traversed the places described by Rigoni Stern in every season, transforming the landscape into a narrative element where memory, ecology, and the search for harmony between man and nature intertwine.
Mario Rigoni Stern, one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century, dedicated his work to the Asiago Plateau, the landscape that shaped, educated, and nourished him. Through his books, the writer tells the condition of man in the mountains, the conscious relationship with the woods, the waters, the pastures, proposing an ideal of harmony between human beings and nature that characterized past centuries and remains possible today in various ways. For Rigoni Stern, this harmony represented the only path to individual and collective happiness.
The French photographer Loïc Seron chose to translate into images the suggestions evoked by the work of Rigoni Stern, undertaking an emotional journey through the places that the writer transformed into literature. With a rigorous methodology, Seron traversed the Plateau in every season, starting from the spring of 2014, capturing the signs of landscape transformation and the persistence of a contemplative beauty. His photographs, both in color and black and white, do not seek a spectacular effect, but rather the essence of the places: the delicate weave of the paths, the layering of the woods, the breath of the pastures, the quiet architecture of the villages. Each image becomes a page of Rigoni Stern’s text, each photograph a critical reading of the landscape.
ALTIPIANO presents a selection of about 70 photographs, accompanied by excerpts from the works of Rigoni Stern and personal texts by Loïc Seron. The exhibition is complemented by original materials from the writer, offering the visitor an immersive experience that combines visual investigation with literary expression. Each stop of the exhibition aims to transform the viewer into a conscious reader, inviting them to recognize in the photographed landscapes the places of collective memory and reflection on our relationship with the natural environment.
M9 Radici is the museum space dedicated to temporary exhibitions on the theme of the territory, landscapes, and identities of Mestre, Venice, and the Veneto region. Through this exhibition program, M9 aims to deepen the relationship between the cultural, environmental, and social history of the Veneto region and the present, proposing a critical reflection on how the territory has been represented, transformed, and imagined over time. ALTIPIANO fits within this programming as a visual and literary investigation dedicated to one of the most significant landscapes of contemporary Veneto, contributing to a conscious reading of the memory and territorial identity of Veneto.
THE CURATOR
Loïc Seron, a photographer and musician from Normandy (born in 1972), represents a figure of an artist-researcher characterized by a humanistic approach to visual documentation. His photographic practice focuses on the theme of the relationship between human beings and their environment: landscapes, communities, traditional practices, historical and territorial memory. With the ALTIPIANO project, initiated in 2014, Seron established a deep dialogue with the literary work of Mario Rigoni Stern, whom he met personally in 2007. After the writer’s passing in 2008, the photographer continued to visit the Asiago Plateau in every season, developing a visual research practice characterized by continuity, landscape awareness, and attention to detail. His research does not seek spectacular effects, but rather the authenticity of places and their ability to evoke deep reflections on fragility, beauty, and humanity’s responsibility towards nature. Seron’s work has been exhibited internationally, leading to a traveling exhibition that has touched various Italian cultural institutions.
BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
M9 Museo del ’900 presents BELPAESE. A Photographic Journey, an exhibition project curated by Denis Curti dedicated to Italy itself: its physical landscapes, social fabrics, places, and people. Great Italian photography, from this perspective drawn from the collections of the Fondazione di Venezia, is both the subject of the exhibition and the extraordinary medium through which to retrace the Italian collective history over a century. Through the lens of great photographers, BELPAESE tells the story of societal transformation, the condition of man, his relationship with the territory, and how a nation has been read and represented by those who have been able to record and interpret the present.
The exhibition is configured as a journey between two interpretative modes, two different ways of looking at Italy: on one side, the documentary perspective, through which many authors have been able to tell the condition of man and his social fabric with extreme clarity, recording reality with a careful and responsible eye. On the other hand, there is a strong inclination to dedicate oneself to the evocative sphere, to that figurative process that requires the observer to actively participate in deciphering the messages hidden beneath the ambiguous surface of each frame. Both ways are essential for deeply understanding our country.
The selection made for this exhibition comes from a careful curation of the Zannier and Forma collections, two groups that represent two different seasons of Italian photography in the second half of the twentieth century. Two distinct acquisitions that, when brought together, frame the fluid spectrum of photographic history. The focus of the exhibition is confined to a specific segment of collective Italian history that spans from the Second Post-War period to the present day: precisely the period in which Italy transformed its face, from the post-war era to contemporary times, from reconstruction to the challenges of the present.
The beating heart of this heritage is certainly the collection acquired in 2007 by Italo Zannier, a critic, scholar, and teacher, who has made photography his “fantastic obsession”. This collection is not a simple accumulation of objects, but a work in itself, structured through the choices of its creator, who wanted to document and spread the visual culture of our country. The Zannier collection boasts about 12,000 volumes and 1,300 original photographs, ranging from daguerreotypes to digital prints. Its uniqueness also lies in the “fury” of the researcher: heterogeneous materials such as posters, invitations, magazines, and precious correspondence with the great masters of the Italian artistic heritage of the twentieth century.
The acquisition of all these materials by the Venice Foundation, along with the more recent integration of a substantial amount of works from the Forma archive – an intellectual factory whose Milanese adventure has helped consolidate the art of the image as a critical and interdisciplinary language – has averted the dispersion of a rare overall vision, ensuring the permanence and rediscovery of this treasure in the lagoon city. Through meticulous restoration and digitization work, the images have returned to their original splendor, making it possible to embark on a journey through 170 years of styles and authors.
The exhibition will feature over 50 works, including shots by Mario Giacomelli, Ferdinando Scianna, Italo Zannier, Aldo Beltrame, Fulvio Roiter, Nino Migliori, Tazio Secchiaroli, Luca Campigotto, Mimmo Jodice, Maurizio Galimberti, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Francesca Spanio, Elio Luxardo, and Elisabetta Catalano.
It is following a precise sense of responsibility towards the act of seeing that the commitment of the Venice Foundation is placed, which does not limit itself to preservation, but greatly enhances this symbolic ensemble through always prestigious exhibitions and publications. Safeguarding our mnemonic repertoire means protecting a “fury of images” that continues to speak to us about our identity, our past, and our future, transforming an immense archive into a living organism accessible to the public.
THE CURATOR
Denis Curti is a prominent figure in the international landscape of photography criticism and curation. Artistic director of the Stanze della Fotografia in Venice and consultant for the Venice Foundation in managing photographic heritage, he has directed the International Photography Biennale in Turin, the agency Contrasto, and the monthly magazine Il Fotografo. Author of essays for Marsilio Editori, including the essential Understanding Contemporary Photography (2020), Curti has curated exhibitions dedicated to the major masters of contemporary and historical photography, from Robert Capa to David LaChapelle, from Cartier-Bresson to Helmut Newton. Founder of the Still gallery in Milan and coordinator of the first photographic auctions at Sotheby’s in Italy, he is one of the leading international experts in photography and the collecting market.
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