In My Photos: No to the Violence of War
Vita
2019.05.13
Emergency has chosen to celebrate its twenty-fifth birthday with the photo exhibition “Zakhem | Wounds | Wounds. The war at home – When war comes home “, by the Neapolitan photographer Piscitelli who visited the NGO hospitals in Afghanistan in 2018 and set a goal: “Telling the bond that links the victims to the war and from there to push to reason about the inseparable link between the wounded and what struck them “
Telling the war in images, where violence is not in the actions portrayed, but in the inseparable link between victims and offensive instruments. This is the goal – achieved – by Giulio Piscitelli, a Neapolitan photographer who since 2010 has been producing photojournalistic reports on international current affairs. His photographs are the protagonists of the exhibition created by Emergency to celebrate five years of activity. “By looking after the victims, year after year, we understood something simple. That whatever the weapons, whatever the reasons, war always has the same face: dead, wounded, people who suffer. It is by facing the suffering of hundreds of human beings every day that we have begun to develop the idea of a community in which relationships are founded on solidarity and respect. A society that does without war forever“ said Gino Strada, founder of Emergency.
The exhibition opens Wednesday, May 15 (7 pm) at Casa Emergency in Milan with a meeting which will be present with Piscitelli and Strada, Rossella Miccio, president of Emergency and Giulia Tornari, curator of the exhibition. Moderating Fabrizio Foschini, Analyst of the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
” Zakhem | Wounds | Wounds. The war at home – When war comes home ” , this is the title chosen because it is the victims and their wounds at the center of the photographic story.
“I tried to broaden the journalistic vision to communicate something more”, explains Giulio Piscitelli ( in the picture) who spent a few weeks in March and between September and October of 2018 in Emergency surgical centers for war victims in Kabul and Lashkar-gah in Afghanistan.
These are images in which white is the protagonist. But where does the idea of this new style come from?
“I was struck by the white of the hospital and I thought it could work to be able to tell some of the stories. The images are clearer and I tried to play on these tones”.
Usually, if one thinks of images of denunciation of wars, one thinks of photographs in which violence, the wounded, are in a violent context: bombed houses, dust…
It is true when war hospitals are told, it is easy to give priority to agitated moments, in which doctors and nurses run, work on the moment, look with a photo to restore tension. But in this period that I was embedded with Emergency in the hospital I also experienced moments of calm, those in which you observe the normal course of treatment and there I started to think about what happens after the emergency…
In fact, in the diptychs there are women, men, and children who are already operated …
I was looking for a further confirmation of a reasoning that I had made my own: the traces of the war that people wear. Walking around the hospital and meeting them I felt like taking portraits to them. My attempt is to push to think about the strong bond between the victim and what surrounds him, which is war. Hence the use of an artifice that could tell it, in addition to the victim-executioner relationship, we often do not tie the person to what hurt him. With the diptychs I tried to put a face to objects: gunshots, pieces of bombs… All objects that could expand knowledge.
What are your next projects?
Certainly I would like to go back to Afghanistan, a country I had already met with the Italian military, it is wonderful, but for several years I have been dealing with the migration issue and the victims of racism in Italy, so I would like to go back to Libya, always to tell the migration issue.
The exhibition, will remain open at Casa Emergency in Via Santa Croce, 19 in Milan, from May 16th to June 9th
Hours: Monday – Thursday 12 – 19; Friday 12 – 20; Saturday and Sunday 10 am – 8 pm
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