MonFest 2022 Fotografia - Lisetta Carmi (English Version)
From March 27 to June 12 2022
Sinagogue (vicolo Olper, 44)
Sundays and holidays from 10AM to 12PM and from 03PM to 6PM
Closed: 17-18 of April 2022
Free entry
Viaggio in Israele e Palestina. Fotografie 1962-1967
(Journey in Israel and Palestine - Photographs 1962-1967)
The deep interest that Lisetta Carmi has, as a jewish person, for the new Israel State, brings her to register for a hebrew language course to better understand the reality of the country in order to visit those places in the future, where she will stay for the first time during the fifties and later return more times, first as a pianist and later as a photographer.
In 1960 she begins a long tour within the sphere of cultural exchanges with Italy, She successfully performs in Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv but also in smaller cities like Nethanya or at Kibbutz Yavne, combining the classical repertoire with the contemporary one of Luigi Cortese, Luigi Dallapiccola, Alfredo Casella, Tito Aprea. She remembers the experience as “ In the kibbuts I found incredible success. They loved me and really appreciated the music…”
In the same year, she stops any concert activity to focus on photography. Two years later, during the winter of 1962-1963, she goes back to Israel and Palestine as a photographer, looking for her roots but also for an explanation to the country's contradictions, stuck between the kibbutz socialist experience, the modernization and occidentalization of the new generations and the traditions of orthodox jews.
“I travelled a lot in the country, I visitated many kibbutz, and the orthodox neighbourhood in Jerusalem with the chassidim, which fascinated me for the religious zeal which was so different from that of the modern israelians”.
Through her images, Carmi is able to show the complexity of the realities constituting the new Israel State. A country where the presence of different types of people, like immigrants coming from far away countries with different cultures and traditions like Russia, Poland, India, Italy, Africa , started inevitable conflicts among the groups.
Her reportage fully displays these aspects of the jewish community. Carmi photographs schools, the new university, life in the kibbutz, the urban centres growing in the desert, roads, stores and even the studying in a talmudic school. It is not by mistake that in January of 1963, seventeen of her pictures are published by Bompiani in the “L’atomo e la Bibbia” (The atom and the Bible) volume by Giovanni Russo.
In the face of historic events, Lisetta has always taken the side of the emarginated, of people who suffer and fight against injustices: the strife with the palestinians and the resulting Six-Day War bring her back to Israel in 1967 just one month after the end of the military conflict.
In July she visits the palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, taking a series of pctures with particular emphasis on children forced to live “without hope to leave”.
This will be the last trip of the photographer in the “Land of two Peoples”. Her conscience would come out profoundly moved, leaving her relationship with Israel unsolved.
Giovanni Battista Martini
Lisetta Carmi is a tremendous artist, whose work is currently experiencing a moment of new discovery and attention. It is a deserved recogniton for her research and photographic production after many years of activity, where ahestetic quality and documentary value add up to produce a precious and significant work. The pictures, exhibited at the Jewish complex in Casale Monferrato, are thirty five, of which more than two thirds are never-before seen pieces. It is a great opportunity to discover her photographs today and observe them “talking” to the public, still currently relevant even if captured by Lisetta Carmi over fifty years ago. This exhibition finds its place in the schedule of activities dedicated to visual art, especially contemporary, that distinguishes our cultural offer and confirms, through the production of these never-before-seen pictures, the constant effort in creating and not only in divulging, other than the active partecipation of the Jewish community to transform and collectively grow socially, in our territories and abroad. We are deeply grateful to the Lisetta Carmi Archive, the city of Casale Monferrato and everyone involved in the Monfest 2022 for the great work of collaboration and coordination that makes every event unique by offering a program integrated between photographers and institutions, actually raising a discussion on a larger scale about contemporary photography of great value.
Daria Carmi
Young Curator of the Casale Ebraica Foundation
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Biography
Lisetta Carmi was born in Genoa on the 15th of February 1924, from a well-off middle-class family.
Because of racial laws, she was forced to leave school in 1938 and seek refuge with her family in Switzerland. In 1945, once the war was over, she came back to Italy and graduated from the Milan conservatory.
In the following years she did a series of concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Israel, where she launched a long tour within the sphere of cultural exchanges with Italy.
In 1960 she stopped her concert career and approached photography, at first casually but then transforming it into an actual profession. For three years she works as the photographer of the Duse Theatre in Genoa. She accepts several commissions from the Genoa Municipality, creating a series of news reports in which she describes the different and problematic social realities of the city, like hospitals, the general register office, the city centre and its sewers. During this decade, she goes back to Israel twice as a photographer.
After completing an extensive report on the Genoa port in 1964, that will later become an itinerary exhibition, she continues her work with a report about Sardegna started in 1962 that will be finished in the seventies.
Later on, she moves briefly to Paris and from her stay there, the volume Metròpolitain is born, the artist's book with pictures taken in the metropolitan city. In 1965, her most notable work begins to take shape, which will become a book in 1972, dedicated to the Genoa's transvestites. In 1969 she travelled for three months in South America and the following year in Afghanistan and Nepal.
In 1971 she buys a trullo in the Puglia region, in Cisternino. In 1976 she meets the Hymalaian Mahavatar Babaji Herakhan Baba, in Jaypur, India, which will radically transform her life. In the same year, she is in Sicily on an assignment for Dalmine for the volume Acque di Sicilia (Sicily's waters), a collection of pictures of landscapes and social realities of the region, accompanied by text from Leonardo Sciascia. Over the years, she creates a series of portraits of artists and personalities from the culture world such as Judith Malina, Joris Ivens, Charles Aznavour, Edoardo Sanguineti, Leonardo Sciascia, Lucio Fontana, César, Carmelo Bene, Luigi Nono, Luigi Dallapiccola, Claudio Abbado, Jacques Lacan and Ezra Pound, of whom are worth mentioning the famous pictures taken in 1966 at the poet’s house on the Zoagli uplands in Liguria.
In the following years, Lisetta Carmi fully commits to building the Bhole Baba ashram in Cisternino, and spreading her master’s teachings. In 1995, she met, after 35 years, her former piano student Paolo Ferrari and begins with him a collaboration on a philosophical-musical study.
Lisetta Carmi currently lives in Cisternino. -
Photogallery
