The Istituto is pleased to present the Photography Exhibition: “Striking Piazzas Of Sicily”, by Armando Rotoletti
Opening Night September 13 | 7p
From September 16 to November 6 the exhibit will be available to the public MON to FRI ( 10 am to 5 pm), Columbus Centre
“Sicilia in Piazza”/”Striking Piazzas Of Sicily”
After 156 days of shooting; 7000km crossing Sicily coast to coast, east to west and north to south; 256 emails sent to municipalities requesting to free the squares of cars and catering equipment that would upset their appearance; Armando Rotoletti, renowned portrait and reportage photographer from Messina, offers to us in this book 82 Sicilian squares as we have never seen them. His squares lay empty in wait for the people to arrive, stirring our imagination, unnerving, bewitching, annihilating and surprising us.
The art historian, Salvatore Settis, says about the photographic book of Armando Rotoletti: “In Sicily, the square is a scenery that does not follow any script, but that of the pulsating life of its city. The square in Sicily (or rather, in Italy) is the most original creation of an idea of a city that not only acts as a den or nest but rather as the temple of humans, the theatre of political and social life. Therefore, Rotoletti’s enterprise is somewhat heroic (because of the difficulties surely met taking photos of squares without the thousands of contraptions invading them), but above all, it is innervated with beauty and hope.”
BIO
Armando Rotoletti was born in Messina, Italy in 1958. He studied at the St. Mary College of London and at the London Polytechnic (nowadays University of Westminster) and then he moved to Milan to work in photojournalism. Between 1985 and 1995 he produced a number of works which appeared in both personal and ensemble exhibitions. In 1990 he was invited by Grazia Neri to join her famous agency, thus starting his career as portrait photographer of renown people from the arts, entertainment and economics. His work was published on a number of magazines such as Corriere della Sera’s supplements “Sette” and “Io donna”, Vanity Fair and The Sunday Times.
For the past fifteen years, he has also been involved in works dedicated to social investigation and photographic stories of his sicilian territories. Among his books: Casa della Carità. I volti e le storiw(2005), Barbieri di Sicilia (2007), Gente di Barbaresco (2013), Circoli di conversazione a Biancavilla (2013), Valelapena (2013), Scicli, città felice (2014), Vino e gente dell’ Etna , (2014) Il volto dell’ IO (2015) Noto. Le pietre e i volti (2015).
With his most recent publication, Sicilia in Piazza (Striking Piazzas of Sicily, 2017), he continued investigating the land of Sicily by working on a complex project that lead him to photograph 82 squares of famous cities and other lesser known towns, by following a rigorous method of emptying the piazzas from cars and precarious installations: a magnificent fresco of these spaces, free -at least for the duration of a shot- from the visual conditioning of our age.