HELENEUM – LUGANO
The exhibition proposes a journey through the landscape, culture and millenary art of Armenia, through the black and white works by Elio Ciol, one of the most famous masters of Italian photography. “The Worshippers of the Cross” proposes a journey through the landscape, culture and millenary art of Armenia, through the black and white works created by Elio Ciol. Launched in 2012, the project was curated by Adriana Mazza, in collaboration with Alessia Borellini. Both museum researchers interacted with Maestro Ciol and drew on the contributions of distinguished specialists from different disciplines, including Ermanno Arslan, Claudio Bonvecchio, Baykar Sivazliyan and Cardinal Georges Cottier. As it has already happened for other similar projects, the 76 art photographs on display in the exhibition, all first prints made with analogue technique and printed in black and white, will become part of the MUSEC collections.
The Project
Elio Ciol’s reportage focuses on the Armenian landscape and traditional architecture, dwelling on the value, both ethical and aesthetic, of the myriad crosses carved in stone, with which Armenians have expressed for centuries, in an almost obsessive manner, their radical adherence to Christianity. It is a lyrical portrait, played out in the exaltation of the contrast between light and shadow, deliberately intended to suggest love for Creation and the power of Faith. The “worshippers of the cross” are those who have supported and encouraged the hands of the invisible stonemasons who, from the early Middle Ages to the present day, have been able to interpret the inexhaustible need for a collective religiosity capable of bringing the often unfulfilled expectations of History back to unity; they are “the absent figures”, the witnesses of a civilisation that has profoundly echoed in the depths of the human experience and visual culture of the Friulian artist. Elio Ciol (b. 1929) is a leading figure of international photography in the second half of the 20th century. His favourite subjects are landscape and cultural heritage, investigated with a systematic approach and absolute technical mastery. In his seventy-year career, Elio Ciol has held almost two hundred solo and group exhibitions in numerous countries. He has published around thirty photo books presenting the outcomes of the different phases of his personal research, and illustrated over two hundred volumes. His works have been part of the collections of numerous museums for decades, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
To explore some of the themes of the exhibition, the following four lectures were held at the Heleneum:
– on 7 March, Aldo Ferrari, ‘Armenia. A millennial history’;
– on 14 March, Paolo Arà Azarian, ‘Introduction to Armenian Architecture’;
– 18 April, Maurizio Redegoso Kharitian, “Armenian music between tradition and modernity”;
– 9 May, Agopik Manoukian, “Dialogues between Armenian culture and Italy throughout the 20th century”.
“Esovisioni is a cycle dedicated to the peculiarities and paths of looking at cultures through the photographic lens. The working hypothesis is that the photographer, taking the exotic image as a pretext has, consciously or unconsciously, returned his own inner vision, fertilising the collective imagination with artful images and stereotypes of different cultural realities.