On display, 24 drawings that are so many silent screams. Fixed in pencil or ink on the most diverse supports: notebook sheets, recycled paper and even books. To give shape to, and somehow exorcise, horror, creating works of art. And, also for this reason, even more extraordinary. 24 testimonies about Dachau, taken directly from those who were deported there, marked with the tragic Red Triangle of political deportees.
Testimonies that in the history of art can be compared to those of Goya.
23 of the drawings had been "forgotten" among the archive files in the headquarters of ANPI, ANED, ANPPIA and one in the headquarters of the Regional Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Friuli Venezia Giulia, from which they emerged in July 2016 during a research that Professor Franco Cecotti, collaborator of the IRSML and today vice president of the National Association Former Deportees-ANED, was conducting.
The object of his interest was a folder containing mimeographed material and materials entitled "The Italians in Dachau" of May '45. The same date was also reported on a second folder, marked “Dachau field drawings”, from which Mušič's drawings emerged. Made just after the arrival of the Allies, when the artist survived in the camp in a sort of quarantine, overwhelmed by the anguish that still tortured him.
The 24 works brought together in the exhibition were part of a larger corpus of pieces that the artist donated in part to his surviving companions. Drawings that later went missing. With the fortunate exception of the nucleus exhibited at the "Revoltella". Once back in Italy, Mušič was unable to deal with the anguished memory of the concentration camp for years. He dedicated himself to narrating his beloved Venice and the Dalmatian landscapes. Until the seventies, when, after a quarter of a century, he managed to propose in the series "We are not the last", "the horrid that is inherent in man".
Observing the corpses, in piles, in piles, which were his companions in Dachau and which he fixes in his drawings of 45, one can well understand the urgency of moving away from the nightmare which marked Mušič forever.
He had arrived in Dachau in November 44. That year, on the occasion of one of his exhibitions in Venice, the artist had met Ivo Gregorc, who was part of the Slovenian Red Cross, engaged in the resistance against the Nazis. The bond of friendship did not escape the SS stationed in Venice who arrested Mušič on charges of collaboration with anti-German groups. After his detention in Trieste he was deported to a concentration camp in Germany where he remained for seven months, until June 1945.
"The 24 drawings by Mušič, a true treasure of art and history, will remain in our Collections after the exhibition", underlines Laura Carlini Fanfogna, curator of the exhibition as well as director of the Civic Museums and Libraries Service of the Municipality of Trieste. “And they will be joined – he explains – by the historic video interview that the artist released in 1999, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, for the documentary by Giampaolo Penco“ Zoran Mušič: a painter in Dachau ”.
"On this occasion we also wanted to document - as Carlini Fanfogna once again - the reality of that camp and other extermination camps, through a selection of images that the USIS-United States Information Service took there upon the arrival of the allied troops . They are images taken from our photo library, rich in almost 3 million photos and, among them, a corpus of no less than 14 granted by USIS”.
“Dachau was the deportation camp for many people from Trieste – recalls the City Councilor for Culture Giorgio Rossi – and this exhibition unites the greatness of art with the memory of a truly significant page in our history”.
The exhibition, entitled “Zoran Mušič. Glazed eyes”, is promoted by the Municipality of Trieste-Culture Department and curated by Laura Carlini Fanfogna.
Image: Zoran Mušič, Dachau, 1945
