PAOLO VENTURA and photos taken at age 10. The funerals of Fausto and Iaio

VERNISSAGE
“Paolo Ventura e le foto scattate a 10 anni. I funerali di Fausto e Iaio”
Libreria Marini, Via Perugia 18 - Dec. 14, 2024, 6:30 p.m.
The artist will be present
 
In 1978 I was 10 years old. I do not have precise memories of that time, I have more like feelings; cold, fog, boredom, Mario Pastore reading the news on TG2 and terrorism.
I don't know why I stole my older brother's Nikon that afternoon and together with a friend went to Casoretto to the funerals of Fausto and Iaio. Perhaps, as a history buff, I wanted to attend an important event. We walked home and I felt great with the Nikon around my neck (Paolo Ventura).

So writes Paolo Ventura, about that roll of film rediscovered decades later, on the adventure that led him to go out alone-at just 10 years old-in a Milan shocked by the murder of Fausto and Iaio, two very young militants of the Leoncavallo social center, and that was preparing to greet them with a funeral attended by more than 100,000 people at the church of Santa Maria Bianca al Casoretto.
The exhibition at Rome's Libreria Marini, composed of 10 photographs selected from that roll of film, restores the impressions that the great events of history leave on the skin of a child, a future artist, who at the time of the events perceives the electricity, the upheavals, and the shroud of terrorism enveloping his city and the whole of Italy, and finds a way to return that tension through the camera stolen from his brother.
These are all very similar photographs, in which architecture and buildings, the absolute protagonists of the artist's future artistic imagery, serve only as a backdrop to the immense crowds, the raised fists and flags, bouquets of flowers abandoned in the streets, the disconsolate yet determined faces of so many young people.

They would look like the usual photos of clashes, demonstrations and struggles of the 1970s, were it not for a touch of tenderness one receives from the shots from below that reveal the very young age of the not-yet-artist (or maybe already?) Paolo, always at the back of the crowd, perhaps a bit intimidated by all those people but still eager to participate, record, give back.

An artist's book, “I funerali di Fausto e Iaio,” published by Danilo Montanari Editore, in a limited edition of 120 numbered and signed copies, printed on 1970s mimeograph paper, was produced for the exhibition.