Presentations

“City of Flies” – Riccardo Bononi & “La via della bellezza” – Umberto Verdoliva

Accademia Scaglia
Via Rittmeyer 7/A - Trieste

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Saturday 26 October 2019
12.30 - 13.15

Opening of exhibitions “City of Flies” by Riccardo Bononi and “La via della bellezza” by Umberto Verdoliva, presented by the art director of the Festival Angelo Cucchetto in dialogue with the two authors and Enrico Scaglia.

City of Flies – Riccardo Bononi

Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, is home to one of the largest landfills on the African continent, active since the 1960s. The landfill, which today is more than 20 acres wide, is constantly expanding and receives every day between 350 and 550 tons of new rubbish every day. In the heart of the hills of rubbish, up to 10-15 meters high, a perpetual fire burns and the alien landscape is wrapped all year round by toxic smoke.
About 3,000 people currently live and work here collecting plastic, metals, bones and coal. Attracted to the city by the hope of a better job and life, they have now found themselves living in the place with the highest number of cases of Bubonic and Pulmonary Plague in the world. Many of the inhabitants are orphans or abandoned children, the luckiest of the many unwanted newborn babies and fetuses whose small graves are scattered throughout the landfill.
Residents of the capital call this place “Ralalitra”: the city of flies.

La via della bellezza – Umberto Verdoliva

Why is it natural to collect the most beautiful shells and pebbles on the beach of the sea?
It’s the same mental process I use with photography; collecting simple moments from everyday life to preserve them over time in the hope that someone else will see with your eyes. A long walk enchanted by faces, gestures, shapes, lights that I like to transform through a camera into harmony, charm, poetry.
Beauty is a question of looks, it is the power of the eyes that try to see outside the reflection of what is inside to explain it to themselves, perhaps beauty as a life celebration where a single and constant thought takes away moments from becoming, making them unconquerable and resistant to the time that generated them.

“I do not believe in political revolution, I believe in poetic re-evolution, because poetry is essential for the human being, because the human being cannot reach the truth, the maximum he can reach is beauty, and beauty is the splendor of truth.”
Alejandro Jodorowsky