Ferdinando Scianna: Il Ghetto di Venezia 500 anni dopo

From 26 August 2016 until 8 January 2017, the rooms of this Venetian building on the Giudecca island will be hosting the exhibitions “Ferdinando Scianna. Il Ghetto di Venezia 500 anni dopo”, curated by Denis Curti. The show of work by Ferdinando Scianna exhibits the photographs taken for the Fondazione di Venezia and specifically realised for the Tre Oci on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice.

The top floor of the Casa dei Tre Oci is devoted to the work of one of the most important Italian photographers, Ferdinando Scianna (Bagheria, 4 July 1943). For the occasion of the 500 years since the foundation of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice (on 29 March 1516), the Fondazione di Venezia decided to undertake a photographic reconnaissance with the aim of recounting contemporary aspects of the Ghetto. The exhibition project has been organised by Civita Tre Venezie. Scianna has undertaken a typically Street Photography reportage by collecting together images of the everyday life of the Ghetto, including portraits, buildings, and the interiors of houses and places for prayer. Churches, restaurants, squares, and gondolas are the subjects that enliven the visual panorama of the project. As part of this narrative, mention should be made of the coexistence of a symbolic, historical, and ritual dimension intrinsically connected to places and gestures, and of simplicity in the description of a present and ordinary time.

The curator Denis Curti has said, “Ferdinando Scianna has been able to construct a delicate story […]. He has given a form to collective memory by pinpointing and heightening individual stories: we can feel their beauty and solemnity. […] The pain of the Holocaust, which is never overstated. The stumbling blocks and marks of an event that will remain indelible. […] We orient ourselves within these photographs. The cardinal points become an embrace and indicate a visual trust that allows us to enter into the intimacy of the many portraits that make up the complex mosaic of this experience: this is the language of affection, and the grammar of the body”. The exhibition “Il Ghetto di Venezia 500 anni dopo” will have a catalogue in Italian and English, published by Marsilio Editore, which will contain, among other things, essays by Donatella Calabi, Denis Curti, Paolo Gnignatie, and Ferdinando Scianna.