Photography: "Emulsions of Ethiopia" by Luigi Simeoni

The photographic exhibition by Luigi Simeoni entitled "Emulsions of Ethiopia" is held in Imperia at the Villa Favarelli Museum of Contemporary Art from 6 to 22 December 2019.

In the world there are many ways to celebrate Christmas and photography is able to represent them all in a thousand facets, in the infinite possible colours. It is a great religious festival, loaded with designs and meanings and therefore with images, but also a great meeting of people who meet, who participate in collective rituals. What we offer you is a different, anomalous photographic Christmas: it is the most important religious holiday in Coptic Christianity which takes place in Axum and Lalibela, the holy city, in Ethiopia during the first days of January.

This journey is proposed to us in the splendid setting of the Villa Favarelli Museum of Contemporary Art in Imperia starting next Friday 6 December with the photographic exhibition by Luigi Simeoni – Emulsions of Ethiopia. Forty-two black and white images are exhibited divided into three rooms: the portraits; the Genna in Lalibela, Christmas of the Copts and the daily life in the villages. Furthermore, the exhibition is accompanied by a four-handed film signed by Simeoni himself and Roberto Gabriele where the preparatory days of the great festivity are told, the hours of waiting and the night of the eve of Genna.

The images show almost painted faces with intense expressions, marked and dug by deep wrinkles as perhaps only the sun and the sand of the desert are able to do. The images appear three-dimensional due to the thousand details that compose them and represent a harmony, a daily life and a crossroads of curious and hospitable humanity. The world that is represented appears serene: armed men, women, peasants and breeders laden with goods are smiling. Looks full of pride, almost aware of descending from the legendary Queen of Sheba, gestures that represent faith in a religion preserved at the cost of a thousand battles carried out in a context often hostile to them, internalized generation after generation.

The author has used a print with an ancient technique, which dates back to the early 900s. The photographs are printed on coarse-grained cotton paper, which enhances the characters in the images and makes them almost tactile. Subsequently, the paper is brushed by hand with a liquid emulsion of silver nitrates capable of making each image a unique and unrepeatable work. As Augusto Pieroni writes in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue: “…calling them Emulsions the author points out the use of analogic, photochemical techniques, in the printing phase if not also in acquisition. It's not a vintage nostalgia, but a recovery of the passion for silver (as the French say) totally current and contemporary. The photosensitive emulsion is applied by hand in superimposed liquid brushstrokes, and its texture emphasizes an equivalent material play in the earthly world that it depicts: lands, canvases, complexions, woods, patterns of decorated fabrics…”. The catalog itself is a work of art, not just a photograph.