Book display and guided tour of the open air exhibition La città che (non) c’è

The series of meetings held in Piazza Bartolomeo Perestrello  every Thursday from June 16 to July 7 will be joined this year by an exhibition spread throughout the neighborhood, involving public and private spaces, starting at the Leporello bookstore and ending at the Piazza che non c’è.

On show Sandro Becchetti, Jean Marc Caimi e Valentina Piccinni, Paolo di Lucente, Simona Filippini, Erik Goengrich, Graciela Iturbide, Anders Petersen, Giovanna Silva, Massimo Siragusa and Joel Sternfeld, with their books on display in Leporello during the festival.

The exhibition is devoted to different and powerful visions of Rome taken from a series of photobooks inspired by the city over the years, and its intent is to once again weave a link between the page-as a narrative, critical and poetic place-and collective spaces.

Drawing from combinatorial literature, the technique behind Calvino’s book, we weave together a series of mappings of the imagery of eleven authors, just as eleven are the categories Calvino uses to subdivide the fifty-five cities mentioned by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

Memory, desire, signs, subtle cities, exchanges, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuous cities, hidden cities: through the suggestion of these words, narratives are staged that dialogue with the rows of aqueducts, the open and closed spaces, the popular and vernacular housing and why not? even the abuses and abominations as well as the beauties of this quadrant of the city of Rome, in a manner similar to most of the book’s descriptions: paratactic accumulations punctuated by alliterations that here take the form of visual resonances between a pervasive past and a continuous present.

Like the cities narrated by Marco Polo, the city images of Rome created by our authors seem to be united by a continuous exchange of elements, deconstructed and reconstructed, always reinvented. By recombining them, by extracting only a few pieces of their respective puzzles, we give the possibility to make their narratives our own, to imagine a city, too, that is there, but not yet there, to give answers, albeit in passing, to our questions.

Pictures are set in the shop that supported La città che non c’è, here the exhibition map: https://bit.ly/39eduWr