Homeless people become photographers for a year and their photographs are exhibited in the center of Milan, at the Gallerie d'Italia in Piazza della Scala. The exhibition "13 Stories from the Street. Homeless photographers”, hosted in the museum headquarters of Intesa Sanpaolo and commissioned by the Cariplo Foundation, is curated by Daria Gallico and can be visited from 28 May until 1 September 2019. The exhibition stems from the collaboration with Ri-scatti Onlus, who has been carrying out social integration projects through photography since 2015. With the support of Fondazione Cariplo, the photography workshops for homeless people, men and women, Italians and foreigners, selected with the help of the Department of Social Policies of the Municipality of Milan and followed by Witness Journal photojournalists, have become a fixture. Among them were those who held the camera in their hands for the first time and those who, after a long time, returned to use it, rediscovering its secrets and expressive power.
Ransom is an important word for Fondazione Cariplo. In 28 years the Foundation has achieved thousands of initiatives through which people have found their redemption. People accustomed to being defined by default: "without", without a job, without a home, without a future, to whom the Foundation has tried to restore an identity with job placement, social housing and community welfare projects. Ransom is finding your job again, finally or again possessing the keys to a house, rebuilding lost ties. From this meeting a new awareness was born: that redemption can also pass through the rediscovery of the dignity of one's gaze. «Photography has changed my attitude, my perception of the world. The need to find beautiful subjects to photograph forced me to look for the beauty in things. I was no longer passive in life, I had become a seeker of beauty,” said one of the protagonists.
The next step was to ask the photographers who had participated in the workshops to document the reality of the Cariplo Foundation, a constantly evolving heritage of people and projects, to entrust them with the story of their identity. The result is today in the prestigious spaces of the museum and cultural center that Intesa Sanpaolo has made available. On display are 52 unpublished images chosen from 9.800 shots that the 13 authors created over the course of a year, photographing 13 projects selected from the 1500 that Fondazione Cariplo carries out every year: the cheerful community of an urban garden, the flight of an acrobat, an apartment where disabled children live, the face of a scientist. Some of the homeless photographers made it to the end of this year, some got lost along the way, leaving only their images: it was an exciting journey that crossed frailties and hopes, fears and horizons.
A perspective that he combined the act of telling with that of telling himself: in addition to the images, video interviews with photographers will be screened in the exhibition. A testimony that illuminates the lives of people who cross the peripheral, fragile, marginal soul of Milan every day. We'll find out who they are, where they spend the day, where they eat, how they wash, who they've lost along the way, what places they call home, what they want and what they've found by observing the world with the camera. A year-long journey that took them from the suburbs to the heart of the city.
Giuseppe Guzzetti, President of the Cariplo Foundation, he said: “I have always thought that to awaken consciences we should bring the least, the weakest, into the center of our cities. When this happens we push them away because it annoys us to see fragile people in front of the glittering shop windows who maybe ask us for alms. This photographic exhibition, on the other hand, has the great merit of having brought the latter to the center in a different way, as protagonists, reserving for them the stage that is usually left to the great photographers. A symbolic gesture, born to make us think, a gift capable of changing our days. If we cross the threshold of the Gallerie d'Italia, expecting to see masterpieces by great photographers, we may not find them, but we will witness a rarer marvel: we will see beautiful photos because whoever took them used that hole of light to climb back from the abyss , and then turned it into a shot, indeed into a ransom”.
Giovanni Bazoli, Chairman Emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo, instead commented: “From an inclusive and therefore authentically social perspective, our Gallerie d'Italia want to be open to the community in all its forms: a space that offers new opportunities even to those who live in conditions of hardship, marginality and fragility. This is the reason why we enthusiastically accepted the invitation to host the exhibition 13 Storie dalla strada in Piazza Scala, the result of a project by the Cariplo Foundation in collaboration with the Ri-scatti Association. Among other things, the initiative consolidates the very close relationship between Intesa Sanpaolo and the Cariplo Foundation, which has always been a point of reference for the social growth of the area and is present at the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan with masterpieces of XNUMXth-century art enrich our collections. This exhibition, full of meanings, bears witness to our bank's unshakable faith in the value of culture as an instrument of progress and elevation of all members of the civil community and therefore also as a force for change in society”.
"It was a very formative experience for our homeless photographers: having Fondazione Cariplo as a "client" made them responsible and motivated", he confessed Federica Balestrieri, founder of Ri-scatti Onlus. “During the shootings, the Witness Journal photographers came into contact with realities they had never met and who knew how to deal with tact and sensitivity, guided by their teachers. Sometimes these realities were stories of hardship, loneliness, marginalization, which their gaze was able to grasp. They weren't professional photographers, but more than any professional photographer they knew how to adhere to the stories they told, because they spoke of a discomfort that was familiar to them. At the end of this journey, they have overcome their reluctance to talk about themselves by agreeing to talk about their life and their experience in the film that will be shown in the exhibition. An important step, the sign of a newfound self-esteem and awareness of one's abilities, which is the main objective of all Ri-scatti Onlus projects”.