An exhibition that is a little jewel with a beautiful, and long, story to tell. An opportunity that will last just one day, and for a very few hours, not to be missed. This is “Dignitas”, the photographic exhibition curated by the Como lawyer and former councilor, Lorenzo Spallino which – after the preview on Saturday 8 June, of which you see some images on the page – opens today only, Sunday 9 June at interior of his studio overlooking the walls, in via Volta (details at the bottom of the article).
In 2020 he defined the first photographic exhibition he had curated, “Nothing is real”, “a funny thing that I will never do again” only to return, a year later, with “The end of the world is not the end of the world”. Did he fall into it again?
Oh yes, and after the effort of the last event held amidst the difficulties of Covid, I had thought about stopping. Photographic exhibitions are complicated to organize, they require attention and long preparations with all the unknowns involved.
And then, what made you change your mind?
My great-grandmother, Angelina Gelpi Giobbi. It is my wife.
Stories.
Last year I went to visit the family chapel at the Schignano cemetery and saw that the portrait of my maternal great-grandmother, which arrived from Brazil after her death in 1989, was battered. So, thanks to the help of Luigi Cavadini, I had it restored by the Galli Academy which also brought to light the signature of the painter, Pedro Antonio Martinez Exposito. When I finally hung it in my study, I thought about organizing a Christmas gathering with friends there, but my wife put the bug in my ear by telling me that I could do more. And so the idea of this exhibition dedicated to the theme of dignity in female portraiture was born.
His great-grandmother had an extraordinary, almost novel-like life.
She was born in Schignano in 1893 and there she married Luigi Giobbi at a very young age, with whom, in 1912, she had Maria, my grandmother. My great-grandfather’s family had a major construction company and, in the early 1920s, the couple moved to Brazil where the company grew, building some of the most important roads in South America. My great-grandmother, however, always remained very attached to her roots, so much so that at home in San Paolo it was compulsory to speak the Schignano dialect, where she often returned to spend part of the year and where she also returned to have her second-born, Domenico, baptised. And it was she who escaped from Schignano with her children at the outbreak of the Second World War, managing, after an adventurous journey, to embark for America from Portugal, the only port left open.
Besides the portrait of your great-grandmother, what photographs will be on display in the exhibition?
They will only be five shots, but they will have a great impact. There will be “Serena”, the 14 year old American girl, portrayed by Rachel Bujalsky, who made the mistake of sending her boyfriend some shots which then ended up on Pornhub, ending up in a spiral of drugs and suicide attempts. And there will be “Carolina Macchi”, portrayed, just fourteen years old, in 1916 in the information sheet of her at her entrance to the San Martino Psychiatric Hospital taken by Gin Angri. But there will also be “Rashida”, a water seller photographed by Carolina Rapezzi in an African landfill where household appliances, electrical cables and electronic devices are burned to obtain copper and aluminium. And the female soldiers of the Lithuanian army immortalized by Mattia Vacca, up to Daria, who Diego Ibarra Sanchez immortalized sitting at his desk in the bombed school in Ukraine. And, finally, there will be a work by Carlo Pozzoni, “Frammenti di Angelina”, which reassembles material details of the portrait from which the idea for the exhibition was born.
What links these shots to the portrait of your great-grandmother?
Dignity, precisely. You can see it in the looks of all these women who are so different from each other in terms of time and place, even those who did not have the fortune of my grandmother. I think this is an entirely female peculiarity, I don’t think an exhibition dedicated to male portraits could have the same strength.
DIGNITY
Sunday 9 June 2024
From 10am to 6pm
Spallino law firm
Via Volta 66, Como
Free admission
