Campobasso photography center “Vivian Maier” and the photographic cultural association “Sei torri Tommaso Brasiliano” with the patronage of the Municipality of Campobasso are organizing the photographic exhibition “The people of the Jubilee” by Tommaso Ausili and Carlo Gianferro, from 18 to 30 June .
Il Popolo del Giubileo (Jubilee People) is the title of the photographic project by Tommaso Ausili and Carlo Gianferro.
Their studio is located in the heart of Rome, a stone’s throw from the Vatican – on the privileged route, essentially, for all pilgrims, curious people, tourists, visiting religious people, as well as for improvised tour operators who, even for just one day, gravitate to St. Peter’s in the special year of the Jubilee, inaugurated by Pope Francis on 8 December 2015 with the opening of the Holy Door.
The scan of a simple souvenir postcard, with the dome standing out against a sky painted electric blue, is the backdrop to a very special photographic set: St. Peter’s and its famous colonnade as we would all like to see it, on a busy day sunny and with few people, a stone’s throw from the real one, attacked by hordes of tourists and lashed, obviously, by the possible vagaries of time and history.
In front of this set and just before entering the actual square, the Jubilee people, or at least a large representation of them, stopped and underwent the portrait ritual. Just as the Pompeo Batoni-style painters of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rome worked to immortalize the tourists of the Grand Tour, so today Ausili and Gianferro compose, image after image, a visual history of the Great Journey and its protagonists. Against the painted backdrop, young seminarians, cheerful nuns, souvenir sellers, Roman gladiators, soldiers in great pomp, folkloristic witnesses of ancient European identities, convinced Catholics, simply curious people, church ministers, families on excursions and all the particular fauna stopped. human which constitutes the backbone of that religious tourism that the city attracts like few others in the world.
The silent and empty space of the studio isolates the subject who, now, is no longer one of the many tourists but finally becomes the protagonist of the image and, by extension, of his own journey. Each portrait is carefully studied: the subject takes possession of the scene and maintains its own, autonomous relationship with the colonnade and the dome in a sort of symbiosis that, when it arrives in the square, it will perhaps struggle to find again.
And if the background doesn’t change, the images tell different stories. As if we were among the dioramas of a Natural History Museum, each “painting” reveals a world and the different elements – the plumed hat, the mirrored sunglasses, the monsignor’s cloak… – are the clues to a condition of existence at times far away, others very close, which we sense and which will then merge with the others in the great melting pot of the colonnade, a few meters away.
Exhibition inauguration:
Tuesday 18 June 2024 at 6.15pm
Samnite Circle
Piazza Pepe, Campobasso
Exhibition times from 19th to 30th June:
From Monday to Friday 5.30pm – 8.30pm
Saturday and Sunday 10.30am – 1.30pm and 5.00pm – 8.30pm
Free admission
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