PAOLO SIMONAZZI – “MANTUA” CUBA

PAOLO SIMONAZZI
Mantua, Cuba

Vicolo Folletto Art Factories
from 7 October to 4 November 2017.

Mantua, Cuba is a project that arises from an intimate and primary need: to remember the friend Velmore Davoli, who visited those places in 1999 within an international cooperation program.
The project, in its complex and long evolution, has been enhanced by the fundamental contribution of Davide Barilli, who knows well Cuba, often protagonist of his novels and tales.
On the basis of these stresses, a study and research reveal an interference between history and legend, between perhaps an Italian origin of the small Caribbean town and a Genoese brigand sunk in the ocean, not far from the coasts to which it would be Mantua. The legend is enough and advances to build a narration and to look for elective affinities, seemingly unlikely, between the Pannonian and Cuban provinces, between objects, symbols and suspended details in a "small world" that protects their visceral identity.
Simonazzi photographs what he finds a sense of belonging, regardless of geographic latitudes, or the very idea of ??a province: an enchanted nebula, where the walls can be witnesses of pieces of history, faith, and magical syncretism. And just from the vision of a written resentment on a neglected building, Olvido's Bar, it all started. A writing that becomes the feeling around which the whole project revolves, the forgetfulness as a red thread between Mantua, its bizarre Italic legend and the intrinsic ability of remote places to swallow the Story, to turn it and make it dance on a paper theater . All this is filtered by a well-defined photographic culture that identifies its models in that important experience that from Via Emilia comes to touch the American asphalt: from Luigi Ghirri to New Topgraphers, passing through William Eggleston's chromaticity. A culture that Simonazzi claims and actualizes in the awareness of telling a legend, something that may have already disappeared even if still in front of his eyes. Something that must be protected, even just to try the pleasure of being able to escape, sometimes, into illusions.

Paolo Simonazzi, "Mantua, Cuba"
October 7 – November 4, 2017
Vicolo Folletto Art Factories
Vicolo Folletto 1, Reggio Emilia
Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays: 10:30 – 13:00 and 16:00 – 19:30; private tours outside the opening hours by appointment.

Presentation of the photographic book:
Friday, October 6, 2017, 5:30 pm
Paolo Simonazzi "MANTUA, CUBA" (Greta Edizioni, 2016)
Speaker Davide Barilli and curator Andrea Tinterri spoke
Hall of the Planisphere, PanizziL ibrary , Reggio Emilia, Via Farini, 3

Inauguration of the exhibition:
Friday, October 6, 2017, 19:00
Vicolo Folletto Art Factories, Vicolo Folletto, 1, Reggio Emilia