The Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo hosts the photographic exhibition "L'immagine dell'empresente. Il Sud Italia nella fotografia di Fosco Maraini -1946-1956, curated by Francesco Paolo Campione, and with the scientific coordination of Moira Luraschi and the installation by Marta Santi. The event, inaugurated in the institute's exhibition spaces in the centre of the capital, was held in the presence of Luraschi and Santi themselves, with a large audience.
The photographic production of Fosco Maraini, a well-known anthropologist, orientalist, and one of Italy's leading experts on Japanese culture, returns to the spotlight ten years after 'The Enchantment of the Women of the Sea', a reportage dedicated to the Ama pearl fisherwomen on the islands of Hekura and Mikuriya, off the Noto Peninsula. The exhibition introduces the Japanese public to Maraini's portrayal of Italy, particularly Southern Italy in the immediate post-war period. It consists of some of the most evocative sections of a large retrospective on Maraini's photography organised 20 years after his death at the Musec in Lugano, the result of research that has involved the main institutions that preserve and enhance his work from the very beginning. The photographs, to use a neologism invented by Maraini himself, are images "taken all'empresente". Shots, that is, captured in that unrepeatable moment in which the eye is given to perceiving the movements of the heart and soul. Specifically, the 58 works on display are divided into three sections: "The Clouds", "Our South", "The Mosaics of Monreale". The exhibition catalogue, also published for the occasion by the Institute with texts in Italian and Japanese, contains a selection of the photographs on display, accompanied by an essay by curator Francesco Paolo Campione and an introduction to the three sections. The exhibition, in the Institute's Exhibition Hall, can be visited free of charge until 19 May 2025.
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