PANDEMIC TALES – THE COVID-19 FOUND OF THE ARCHIVIO FOTOGRAFICO LUCCHESE

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Location: Villa Bottini, via Elisa, 9

Date: 28 maggio – 21 agosto 2021

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curated by Enrico Stefanelli and Chiara Ruberti
produced by Archivio Fotografico Lucchese “A. Fazzi”

In one of his best-known essays, Sontag argued that, in contemporary society, due to the increasingly invasive and central role of the media, the pain of others is a everyday show; that every violent or shocking image, for our hyper-stimulated gaze, immediately turns into a cliché. As long as those images don’t concern us closely. And this also happened in the case of the Covid-19 emergency. The first evidence of the existence of the new coronavirus and the consequences of its spread arrived in Italy at the end of last year, through images of the closed market in Wuhan, of citizens with masks and temperature controls in airports. Then the virus arrived in the north of the peninsula, the infections increased and, in its first days,  the lockdown was told through the photographs of the terraces adorned with flags and rainbows. At some point, all of a sudden, the narrative found its extreme synthesis in that one very powerful image of the row of military vans carrying the coffins out of the Bergamo hospital.

Hence the desire to establish the Covid-19 Fund. This is the name of the new photographic collection that the Archivio Fotografico Lucchese “A.Fazzi” set up in May 2020, with the aim of collecting materials relating to the pandemic and to tell – through images – how this was experienced and felt by the territory of Lucca. In order not to get lost in a foggy past, but to be an active source of reflection and also of planning, the images that tell the stories of these months must become part of our collective memory.

The new collection gathers photographs and also audiovisual material, made by authors, not always professionals, from Lucca or who live / work in the Lucca area. The exhibition presents a first selection of their work.