The exhibition LISETTA CARMI. Merry voices in the dark, curated by Luigi Fassi and Giovanni Battista Martini, hosted by MACTE Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Termoli, represents the work of one of the most important figures in Italian photography of the twentieth century: an ambitious project, witness to a common feeling and a natural and anthropological landscape shared between Sardinia and Molise.
70 photographs by Lisetta Carmi taken between 1962 and 1976 in Sardinia, together with unpublished archive materials, compose a tale capable of crossing geographical boundaries.
The exhibition, created by MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro in 2020, in collaboration with the Archive Lisetta Carmi, is reconfigured for MACTE, emphasising the common features that characterize the landscape of Southern Italy: pictures of the landscape modified by human intervention, watercourses, shepards and mountain are accompanied by portraits of social life, work and celebrations.
At the same time, some exhibition rooms of MACTE host a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection, that articulate different interpretations of “landscape”. Works by Elisa Montessori, Luca Patella, Bianca Santilli, Mario Schifano, Giulio Turcato and Eugenio Carmi, Lisetta’s brother.
Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924) comes from a middle-class family of Jewish origin and was forced to exile in Switzerland at an early age for this reason. After a long period devoted to music and playing the piano, Carmi gave up her career as a pianist to take over photography as a tool of political commitment and personal soul searching. She was self-taught and learnt the basics of her job working as set photographer at Teatro Duse for three years, in her city, then carried out a series of photographic reports, like the series devoted to the workers of the port of Genoa. Her commitment to the photography continued with several trips to Israel between 1958 and 1967 and to Latin America in 1969, and then she moved to the East, visiting Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal.
Between 1962 and 1974, during her numerous visits to Sardinia, she took pictures to provide documentary evidence of the social life of the island, particularly of Barbagia. In 1972 the book I travestiti (The Transvestites) was published creating some scandal. In one of her trips to the East, she encountered Babaji, a meeting that marked a radical change in her life and led her to the founding of the ashram Bhole Baba at Cisternino, in Apulia, in 1979, where she devoted herself to the practice and spreading of the teachings of her master.
At the museum it will be possible to buy the catalogue of the exhibition (IT-ENG) published by Marsilio .