Sebastião Salgado - Amazônia

"I would like everyone to stand by us to protect the Amazon." Sebastião Salgado made his debut with these words at the presentation of his exhibition "Amazônia" which, from 1 October to 13 February 2022, will be exhibited at the Maxxi in Rome with the extraordinary binaural soundtrack created by Jean-Michel Jarre in which the sounds of the forest , the roar of the water, the songs of

the birds and the sounds of the other inhabitants of the Amazon melt and envelop the visitors thus allowing a unique experience, as if they were really immersed in the thick of the Amazon rainforest. The curator of the exhibition, Lélia Wanick Salgado, companion of life and ideals of the great photographer, presents a collection of more than 200 black and white images selected from the thousands taken in the six years in which Lélia and Salgado visit and explore the Amazon and its inhabitants. An ecological manifesto that denounces the havoc that is taking place in the green lung of the Earth but which also aims to make known realities that much of the world ignores. In the protected areas, where indigenous tribes still live, nature has remained intact, Salgado shows us a powerful and impetuous Amazon and brings us closer to a magical world, still uncontaminated and linked to the cycles of nature, a world that we must preserve.

The intense shots that the great Brazilian photographer dedicates to the indigenous community, custodian of ancient knowledge, show us proud and aware tribes. "Women in the Amazon are very active", says Salgado, "because they have realized that they are the true custodians of indigenous culture."

Living in art: Casa Balla

We have time until November 21st to immerse ourselves in art and browse the house of Giacomo Balla, one of the most famous exponents of the Futurist movement who, especially after the death of Umberto Boccioni, became the absolute protagonist of it, so that from 1916 he began to sign his works under the pseudonym of FuturBalla. He called his daughters Luce and Elica, which names would be more suitable for the offspring of a man as enlightened, modern and open to the future as Balla was? Yet, anachronistically, the two girls, and future artists, lived almost confined within the Balla art house in via Oslavia in Rome where they moved in 1929. Unfortunately, over the years with the enormous popularity, even political, reached by Futurism, the art and ideals that had initially animated it, faded into the most sinister economic interest, as often happens. So Balla returns to figurative art not before, however, having officially communicated the reasons that led him to this choice: "I had dedicated all my energies to renewing research with sincere faith, but at a certain point I found myself together with individuals opportunists and careerists with more business than artistic tendencies; and in the conviction that pure art is in absolute realism, without which one falls into ornamental decorative forms, so I took up my old art again: interpretation of naked and healthy reality. "

Since June, for the first time, thanks to the initiative of the Maxxi museum in Rome and the project curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Domitilla Dardi, Casa Balla has been open to the public and it is like entering a world apart, almost magical. Waking up, living, sleeping and breathing immersed, literally, in a real work of art: it is no coincidence that both of Balla's daughters became well-known artists. Giacomo Balla lived in his "artwork" in Via Oslavia from 1929 until his death.

The Collage. Son of a lesser god?

"Ballerina"

Some artists and art critics are far from considering it an art form. Yet the collage not only has a millenary history, we find the first testimonies in China as a direct consequence of the invention of paper but it is in Japan that we have the first testimonies at the beginning of the 10th century and later, in Europe, in the illustrations of anatomy manuscripts. It will only be in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that we will find the collage declined in a new form of art, embellished with precious stones and gold leaves in the majestic and evocative Gothic cathedrals.

Picasso and Braque finally gave the place that was due to collage in the history of art and in 1912 Picasso began to create using more materials besides his painting: fabrics, newspapers, packs of cigarettes, matchboxes, playing cards while George Braque adopted the collage technique in his charcoal drawings. Despite this, collage "art" is officially spoken of only with John Heartfield who in 1924 used it as a satirical weapon against Hitler and Nazism using photography for the first time.

George Grosz recalls: "When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any idea of ​​its enormous potential, nor of the thorny but successful road that would lead us. waited. As often happens in life we ​​had tripped over a gold vein without even realizing it. "

Georges Braque

Other pioneers of this versatile art form include Hanna Höch, Paul Citroen, Michael Mejer, Raoul Hausmann as well as great movements such as Bauhaus, Dada and Surrealism.