The city of Taranto is often associated with the former Ilva, the largest steel plant in Europe. Built in 1960, the factory was once a source of pride, but over the years it has proven to be an environmental disaster, spreading carcinogens which, according to various associations and studies, have caused an increase in cancer cases.
With the aim of creating a different narrative linked to the city, enhancing its places and its inhabitants, Artlab eyeland was born last year, a large art laboratory in the area. This year, from 25 May to 30 June 2024, the second edition will take place, which includes exhibitions, workshops and artistic residencies. It is not a festival, as underlined by the artistic director Giovanni Troilo and the curator Arianna Rinaldo, but a place where international artists and local people meet, who together create original works and contents dedicated to the theme “Mother Earth”, as intense as “land that creates, nurtures, is feminine and political”.
On the occasion of the event, the Australian photographer of Italian origins Lisa Sorgini was asked to spend a month in Tamburi, the neighborhood closest to the former Ilva plant, to take portraits of mothers and children in the area: “Many of those women they fight and demonstrate every day for the health of their children”, explain the organizers. The project was also carried out thanks to the collaboration with some entities involved in cultural and social activities. “Sorgini found in Tamburi a place incredibly rich in history and traditions, fiercely proud of its identity. The people she met were warm, forthright and hopeful about their future. Children were supported and nurtured through adversity by strong women and family networks,” Rinaldo said.
Since 2016, the year she became pregnant for the first time and lost her mother, Lisa Sorgini has been photographing pregnant women or with their children. Everything was born from her personal experience, when she realized how the representation of motherhood in films and television programs was distorted and partial, with women always facing pregnancy and the birth of a child with serenity and equilibrium. This rhetoric did not reflect her experience, nor that of many mothers she knew. In his images, often taken in moments in which nothing happens, of apparent banality, Sorgini portrays with great sweetness and frankness “one of the most profound, beautiful and intimate human experiences, but also demanding, implacable and claustrophobic from a physical and emotional,” says the photographer.
Sorgini’s photos taken in Tamburi will be exhibited in the streets of the old city of Taranto. Then they will be on display at PhEst. Monopoli International Photography and Art Festival, from 30 August to 3 November 2024.
){kind=link}