Francesco Guccini

Francesco Guccini. Canterò soltanto il tempo

“Canterò soltanto il tempo” (I will only sing of time) is a line taken from Il tema, a track on the album L’isola non trovata (1970) in which the Italian singer-songwriter Francesco Guccini gives voice to the common thread that runs through much of his poetry, an extremely coherent world where words and storytelling – whether in songs, stories, novels or even conversations – play a central role. Words seem to be the only pretext for giving meaning to the passing of time, to life that in the fleeting transience of the present can, inevitably, only be fully understood and completed with hindsight. The exhibition offers an intimate, although not private, glimpse in which Guccini’s voice takes the visitor metaphorically by the hand and accompanies them through the rooms. It is a game that foregrounds his words, songs and voice, with its unmistakable grain.

Various materials have been made available by the author, many of which have never been displayed before, helping create a constructed narrative, almost like a concept album, around memory, remembrance and time, understood as the flow of life. A series of photographs from Guccini’s personal collection retrace some of the salient moments of his life and career. Each exhibition section has also been interpreted visually by artists, photographers and illustrators invited to provide their contribution.

In this context, two new photographic productions on display have been inspired by Guccini’s favourite themes and those he himself describes as “faded visions of ghosts and people”. With Pavana e ricordi, Paolo Simonazzi goes in search of glimpses of Guccini’s sentimental geography. An atlas through images in which the places and landscapes of Pavana described in the songs on the Radici album and in several novels and stories are paired with objects and interior details that speak of an education rooted in popular culture, a love of literature, comics and vernacular dialects.

In his work, on the other hand, Kai-Uwe Schulte-Bunert tries to give shape, however abstract, to time. Dismantling its mechanisms both metaphorically and physically, he presents it to us as a continuous fluctuation in an undefined space that the camera lens is capable of capturing only in a fragmentary and random way – almost as if to suggest the ways in which memory surfaces, when it focuses on a detail that helps us bring the faint visions that come to us from the past back into the present.

Further illustrations on display are the work of Simona Costanzo, Arianna Lerussi, Veronica Ruffato, Silvano Scolari and Gianmario Taurisano.