Front view
Inv. No.S-0640
ArtistMario Giacomelliborn 1925 in Senigallia, Italydied 2000 in Senigallia, Italy
Title

"Calabria"

(acc. to Grisebach) from the series: Il canto dei nuovi emigranti (de Franco Costabile)
Year1975–1985
Medium

gelatin silver print

Dimensions20 x 27 cm
Signature

titled, annotated (inedita - unpublished) (ink) and artist's stamp on verso

Comment

This series is set in Calabria between 1984-5 and was inspired by Franco Costabile’s poem, Il canto dei nuovi emigranti (The song of the new emigrants); the angry and embittered outpouring of people made to leave their homeland.
Giacomelli visited Cutro, Badolato, Pentedattilo, Caraffa di Catanzaro, Tiriolo e Copanello di Catanzaro, and was taken aback by what he found. "I was struck by Pentedatillo because it felt like another country – where people have been born, have lived, suffered, thrived – now deserted. Travelling through, it seemed completely abandoned. But then when I got to the top of the road and looked down, I noticed salad and onions planted…so there must have been someone there. It felt abandoned, shut off from the world, but I had stumbled upon life. […] I then wanted to go to the cemetery. I found every burial plaque had been polished. I thought the flowers must be plastic, but when I went closer and touched them, they were fresh. And so I thought to myself: it took us half a day to get here, we didn’t meet anyone along the way, everything seemed shut up, dead, but in fact there’s life here. That gave me a strange feeling. These mountains with these huge holes in them…in my imagination I began to fill the holes with people: where were these people? And so something mysterious stirred within me, something magical, tragic, something I couldn’t explain. In these photographs you can see that the houses are already losing something, it’s as if their walls are turning to stone, becoming the mountains, [like they’re] being engulfed. The village is crumbling away. The light I used in this series makes it look like the sun is corroding holes in the houses, when in fact it’s the moon, and the photographs feel tinged with death."
(Mario Giacomelli, in a video interview with E Castagna)
This vision of the South is very different to the one in Giacomelli’s series Puglia, where the overpopulation and poverty of Gargano in 1958 is palpable. It is also very different from the picturesque view of the South we find in Giacomelli’s photographs of Scanno from his time there in 1957 and 1959. With Costabile’s poem in mind, Giacomelli saw Calabria as a place of loss, caught between presence and absence. The houses engulfed by the mountain, the gouged-out rock at Pentedattilo, and people who seem to be mysteriously transfixed in a state of suspension; these are the protagonists of this series.
(www.archiviomariogiacomelli.it)

S-0640, "Calabria"
Mario Giacomelli, "Calabria", 1975–1985
S-0640, Front view
© Archivo Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia
S-0640, Back view
Mario Giacomelli, "Calabria", 1975–1985
S-0640, Back view