The photographic exhibition “Assini dotti. Walking along the Via Francigena” a project by Marcello Moscara .

The exhibition, curated by Carmelo Cipriani , hosted in the basement of the Pino Pascali Foundation in Polignano a Mare, is promoted by the Puglia Region and Teatro Pubblico Pugliese (We guard Culture in Puglia, PACT Special Fund for Culture and Cultural Heritage LR 40 art. 15 paragraph 3 – We invest in your future).

THE PROJECT

On May 19, 2021, having just emerged from the experience of the pandemic, a strange group sets out determined to cover the last stretch of an ancient route on foot, in the company of a donkey. The road is the Via Francigena. The group includes: two musicians (Enza Pagliara and Dario Muci), a photographer (Marcello Moscara), two directors (Francesco De Giorgi and Giovanni Iavarone), a donkey (Bartolo), and his young keeper (Martino Genchi). The group stages an artistic action 200 km long, a journey to tell and tell about themselves, each through their own language and history, in a common idea of regeneration. “The choice of the stretch of path to follow is not random. This legacy that we carry with us is the living and sensitive material of the journey. Poised between past and future, we are new to stories and encounters every day. A coal-fired power plant that can be seen as soon as you emerge from an oak forest, passing through olive groves devastated by Xylella. A resistance, a revolution of the gaze” explains Moscara. From the experience of this journey, a photographic book and a docu-film with its soundtrack were born.

THE EXHIBITION

The story of this journey, told in a photographic book (Marcello Moscara, Asini dotti, with a text by Goffredo Fofi, ed. Moscara Associati 2023), inspired this exhibition. 50 photographs by Marcello Moscara are accompanied by texts by Roberto Mutti (Photographic Critic) and Raffaele Gorgoni (Writer). In the exhibition, an installation (a large book hand-built by the author) entitled " The reversals of a symbol and the coincidence of opposites" suggests to visitors a full immersion in the adventurous symbolic history of the figure of the Donkey through different civilizations and cultures. Original work of design, for historical and iconographic research, the author made use of the collaboration of the art historian Titti Pece. A story within a story: with the gaze and the stories that, like in a blob, move and come together through suggestions: going from Apuleius to Collodi, from the Sumerians and ancient Egypt up to the Kabbalah of the Donkey by Giordano Bruno , from Machiavelli to Prévert, from Romanesque cathedrals to Nietzsche and Fabrizio De Andrè. All this to ask a question again today: what is asinity?