"Tracce - հետքեր" — a photographic exhibition by Patrizia Posillipo — presented by Carlo Coppola

Tracce – Fotografia in viaggio tra Italia e Armenia ("Traces – Photography Travelling Between Italy and Armenia") 

is the full title of the exhibition by photographer Patrizia Posillipo (Պատրիցիա Պոսիլլիպօ), born in Caserta but cosmopolitan by temperament, promoted by the Italian Embassy in Armenia and curated by Isabella Indolfi. The exhibition will open on 20 January and run through 20 February 2022 at the Modern Art Museum of Yerevan. Posillipo, whose given name carries the mystique of a powerful saint venerated in Naples since ancient times — perhaps of Armenian origin — and whose surname evokes one of the most beautiful and romantic places in the world, is a woman and an artist of rare human and professional sensitivity. As she does throughout her artistic itinerary, she brings into the light the spirit of the land she crosses, the communication between people, and the imprints left by both human and divine landscapes. Her training, shaped alongside such masters as Gianfranco Arciero, Italo Zannier, Charles-Henri Favrod, Anne Cartier-Bresson, Walter Rosenblum and Erich Hartmann, together with her long collaboration with the magazine Cinema Sessanta, edited by Mino Argentieri, tempered a gaze forged over a career in which she directed the Studio Posillipo and served for years as the officer responsible for photographic documentation and image archiving for the Italian Episcopal Conference (C.E.I.) and the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Cultural Heritage. This familiarity with the sacred, with devotional iconography and with memory held fast in the human face, remains fully present in this Armenian project. Tracce is, in fact, no isolated gesture, but part of a longer path the photographer has been pursuing for the Italian Embassy in Yerevan: as early as February 2020, under the scientific curatorship of the present writer, she produced a reportage on popular devotion to Saint Blaise in Casal di Principe — the first stone of a project that weaves together Italian and Armenian communities through the slender but tenacious thread of religious and popular tradition. To bring her project to life she has met people, planting her eyes into those of her photographic subjects, letting caresses germinate, exchanging glances of sympathy with the absolute discretion of one who knows when a chest is about to bleed beneath the weight of ancestral memory, and does not extend a hand toward it. The photographer has taken part in these stories, drying tears of joy and of emotion, and tending wounds with gentleness — never immortalizing the haemorrhage of blood gushing from the wound, nor the excess of a nosebleed, but eternalizing instead the smile of one who has found calm and rejoices over pain now soothed. The artist has travelled through cities and through hearts — Casal di Principe, Naples, Bari, Rome and Florence — and along the roads of Armenia, with a gaze wide open to her own nature as a creature made of art, welcoming and unravelling threads tangled for centuries, listening to stories, and in turn allowing others to welcome her, to open to her their homes and their hearts, confiding to her their sorrows, their dreams, and their many hopes. 

TRACCE – Photography Travelling Between Italy and Armenia by Patrizia Posillipo curated by Isabella Indolfi promoted by the Italian Embassy in Armenia 20 January – 20 February 2022 Modern Art Museum of Yerevan

article by Carlo Coppola