Preserving memory throught the lens: Mauro Zorer’s project wins prestigious Civic Museums Prize
For the seventh year in a row, the collaboration between URBAN Photo Awards and the Municipality of Trieste will give life to a prestigious exhibition-award at the Civic Sartorio Museum for a finalist projects in the 2024 edition of the contest.
The winning project on display was selected by Claudia Colecchia, (archivist executive officer and head of the Photo Library – Fototeca and the Library of the Civic Museums of Trieste – Biblioteca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte del Comune di Trieste), and Michela Messina (conservator of the Civic Museum Sartorio – Museo Civico Sartorio).
The exhibition of the winning project is part of the Trieste Photo Days 2024 events taking place in Trieste, in north-eastern Italy. The winning author Mauro Zorer will be honored at the URBAN Photo Awards Ceremony on Saturday, October 26, at the “Marco Sofianopulo” Auditorium of the Civic Museum of Modern Art Revoltella.
Photos from the 2023 exhibited projects at the Sartorio Museum.
The winning project
The photographic project “JUNE 22, 1944 – THE CHILDREN’S MARCH” represents a touching journey through memory and landscape, in an attempt to preserve and restore stories that would risk being forgotten. The author, with great sensitivity and dedication, has been able to transpose into images a past that relives through today’s gaze, powerfully evoking the drama and beauty of life during the conflict. Accompanied by an equally profound text, this photographic project invites us to reflect on the power of memory and the importance of protectin
It is precisely memory that is the core of this touching photographic project, capable of lingering its gaze on the present to evoke a time and a work that deserve to be preserved from any hawkishness.”
Project description by Mauro Zorer
The events that happen involve people and places seemingly transiently. In truth however much time and nature alter the human and landscape datum, each time there is something that inexorably lingers, and it does so through memory. It keeps alive that which – precisely because it happened – will never cease to be, provided it is remembered.
It is precisely memory that is the core of this touching photographic project, capable of lingering its gaze on the present to evoke a time and a work that deserve to be preserved from any hawkishness. It all begins in one place, a large villa that stands solitary amidst the Sienese clays and woods and has been the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Origo since 1924. The place is barren, the countryside at times inhospitable and deserted is compared to the emptiness of a lunar landscape, in which the arid monotony of the terrain is interrupted by lines resembling elephant backs.
However, in this environment of severe deprivation, the Foce (the name of the villa already contains in itself a promise of purity and beginning) becomes a microcosm in which a model of rational agriculture is experimented with, and solidarity, hospitality, and the exercise of humanity are practiced daily. Especially during the most acute phase of World War II, Iris and Antonio Origo’s dwelling became a refuge for all the helpless: fugitives from concentration camps, trembling old Jews, those called to arms who refused to serve the Germans, wounded partisans, children displaced by the bombing. Precisely the latter, on June 22, 1944, would experience an episode that went down in history as the Children’s March. A real exodus that from the Foce, through fields and poorly exposed paths, will reach Montepulciano.
Iris Origo’s account of it in her memoir “War in Val d’Orcia” is dense with pathos: the war events press on, many roads are impassable or dangerous (so it will be necessary to walk briskly and keep in the middle to avoid mines), yet it is necessary to get the children to safety. On that day we set off suddenly, laden with as little as each person can carry, just a bag of bread, the palton, a sweater. But in reality, each child also brings something else with them: and that is beauty, candor, above all the ability to reread reality through their innocence. This allows them to approach the march as if it were an outing, an adventure, and to complain more about stepping on an anthill than about the impending drama.
Whenever a narrative of an episode from the past is attempted, there is an operation of recovering the nonexistent. The places are still there but, time has smoothed them, modified them; the lines of the landscape take on new physiognomies and where there was a path a dwelling may have been superimposed. One is ultimately measured by a dual notion of time: that of before and after. An Arithmos kineseos that, in Aristotelian terms, brings into play not so much the gap between these two dimensions but their complementarity, if the former is the etiology of the latter and with it originates the sense of becoming. That is, it creates time.
The gaze that traversed and investigated the places where Iris built a path to salvation wanted to search the present for an earlier time. It did not slavishly follow a trace, but evoked it by finding it in the present. So the low clouds tell of the unbridgeable distance between the aching land of war and a sky without danger; the trees withered of life are symbols of that war capable of drying up even the sap; the cracks that run through the stone of a building become the objective correlative of a pain imposed and suffered; while the crooked shadow that stands out on a wall becomes a telltale of a malaise that nails even the light.
However, in this work there is not only chronological two-dimensionality, but also tonal two-dimensionality, if darkness, shadow is contrasted with light. It is that which radiates Iris rediscovered in the leafy and protective motherhood of a holm oak; it is the bright and fragile innocence of a lamb that recounts the whiteness, the wonder of every new and young life; it is that overhanging the children that the imagery of the photographic tale recognizes in the trees, now in a row now isolated, rooted to the earth yet reaching upward. The trees-children, in their immersion in the landscape, become the silent guardians of a memory that endures, witnesses of a time that ceases to be distant to mutate into permanence. The flight, described by Calamandrei as a “flight of angels” – icastically captured in the image of the hand from which the feathery appendages of the dandelion branch out – is a translation.
Nothing is, yet everything still can exist: the gaze accepts this challenge and observes. It goes beyond the earth trampled by children, beyond destruction and death. It traverses the winding hills, crosses forest paths and dense fields of wheat, toward salvation and light. Man in all this is everywhere, and he is capable of saving and destroying, of imprinting new lines in the landscape (scars that resemble those inflicted on the imagination of the little ones on the march), but also of protecting and cherishing a memory, evoking it with the strength and courage of his own humanity.
