Towards Jerusalem
in collaboraton with Diocesi di Reggio Emilia e Guastalla
The exhibition is composed by two sections: the first in the Cathedral’s Battistero is the photographer’s a quest to find his destiny, from his mother’s grave through the places where the history of the West took shape – Athens, Rome, Berlin, the ruins left by totalitarianism and the wars of the 20th century – culminating in the Holocaust, represented by the memorial in Miami.
The second part, Jerusalem, is displayed in San Nicolò.
Antonio Sichera writes that, in line with Walter Benjamin’s legacy, Chiaramonte’s starting point is “to remain within romantic modernity and its consequences, impressing upon the aesthetic experience a curvature, an internal tension which, while it continues to remain within, to adhere faithfully to its history, attempts to pierce it in the direction of a messianic time”.
For Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, “going through the images of Jerusalem, we can find other clues too: first of all, people, common people, locals and tourists busy interacting, reading or embracing… each photo is a tool of meditation; each photo is an index. It invites the gaze towards a direction, whether a window to the sky… or a street off the Via Dolorosa with shop-fronts shut and light falling from above. Everywhere we find the same dimension – temporal as well as spatial – of waiting; a space waiting for an event”.
The poet Umberto Fiori wrote 14 compositions. Gerusalemme. Descritture dalle immagini di Giovanni Chiaramonte (Jerusalem. Descriptions from the images of Giovanni Chiaramonte):
“The world is here,
perfectly disappeared.
The sky supports an arch;
the arch, above,
more sky”.
