Lisetta Carmi. Playing loud

Villa Bardini in Florence will be hosting the exhibition “Lisetta Carmi. Suonare forte” from 3 May to 22 October.
This is the first event to be realised thanks to the agreement between Fondazione CR Firenze and Intesa Sanpaolo to bring to Villa Bardini the exhibitions of Gallerie d'Italia's “La Grande Fotografia Italiana” project, celebrating great 20th-century Italian photography through its great masters. The three exhibitions scheduled, opened at the Gallerie d'Italia - Torino in Piazza San Carlo and entrusted to Roberto Koch, publisher, curator and photographer, will have a new layout in Florence.

The first one to arrive at Villa Bardini is the monographic exhibition dedicated to Lisetta Carmi, curated by Giovanni Battista Martini, curator of the photographer's Archives.
The Florentine rearrangement of the exhibition features two special in-depth sections dedicated to the 1966 flood and the Florentine composer Luigi Dallapiccola.
180 photographs taken over the twenty years of her professional life between the 1960s and 1970s are on display, offering a cross-section of Lisetta Carmi's most important photographic projects. This incredibly talented photographer, a survivor of racial persecution, turns the camera into a tool for understanding the world and the human condition while simultaneously finding answers to her own questions and alleviating her existential anguish.
There are nine sections in the exhibition, including the one dedicated to the theme of work. There are the pictures of the dramatic conditions of the workers in the Port of Genoa, her home town, spending their working day unloading phosphates from the ships' holds, covered in white dust; the shots of the factories with the most spectacular and dangerous processes such as the casting of steel at Italsider, and images of the young women working in the cork factory in Calangianus, Sardinia.
Lisetta Carmi's early life as a pianist also interacts with photography in the work dedicated to the Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (Annalibera's Music Notebook) by the Florentine composer Luigi Dallapiccola. The eleven abstract photograms are the graphic interpretation of the eleven pieces written by the musician for his daughter's birthday and are accompanied by four portraits of the maestro.
The section dedicated to the flooding in Florence in November 1966 is completely unprecedented. Carmi herself would later say: “I arrived in a city in shock. For two days and a night, I photographed thousands of wet books, saved miraculously by volunteers, overturned cars, apples embedded in the mud, chairs, bottles and flasks floating in the streets invaded by muddy water”.

The exhibition in Florence is promoted by Fondazione CR Firenze and Parchi Monumentali Bardini e Peyron.
All exhibition ticket holders will receive a discounted admission ticket to the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan, Naples, Turin and Vicenza.

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