La routine of war. The 121 images exhibited at the Luciana Matalon Foundation in Milan www.fondazionematalon.org in the exhibition Images from the front. The great war 1914-1918 they put the First World War under their eyes thanks to never-before-seen photographs. There are the soldiers lined up at the barber shop, the rest waiting for the next assault, the letters from home. And again the guns, the generals and the ambulance wagons that “wait” for the wounded a short distance from the battlefield. There are the men who build the telegraph networks and the women who prepare food for their brothers, husbands, children. Or they dig trenches too.
The world conflict
In the three sections of the exhibition The first line, The front, Beyond the borders, the war that is narrated is not the Italian war, but the Great War of all the peoples involved. You can see the Alpine troops standing out against the infinite white of the snow, and Slovenian women at work in the rear.
The gaze is plural, it embraces the different peoples involved on the Alpine front. S.i recognize King Vittorio Emanuele III who decorates the combatants and honors the mutilated, the Kaiser Guglielmo who reviews the troops, the Austrian prisoners sitting on a lawn paused during a forced march and the Italian soldiers in a moment of rest in the trenches.
Weapons, but …
If the technical and technological evolution has transformed the conflict from that moment onentrusting it to the accuracy and efficacy of weapons as never before and limiting, at least in part, the close clash between individuals, is not that central aspect in the war narrative of the show the images from the front.
The testimonies of destruction and death, the bombed buildings, the wounded, occupy a minimal part of the exhibition. In Images from the front the protagonists of the photographs are the living engaged in the military routine that has become the norm.
Hello by a miracle
“Many of these photographs were published on The diary of our war a publication of the Royal Army that accompanied the entire span of the conflict “says Alessandra P. Giordano, librarian of the Cesare Pozzo Library, http://www.mutuacesarepozzo.org who, together with Eleonora Belloni, researcher of the political and international science department of the University of Siena, curated the exhibition and the catalog of the exhibition. “They are part of a treasure of 249 photographs kept in eight envelopes, many of which collected works from small independent laboratories. A fund belonging to the Circolo Ferrovieri Martiri di Greco, (a village, now a district of Milan) miraculously saved from the oblivion of history and landed at the Cesare Pozzo Transport and Mutuality Library, the largest in Italy dedicated to (rail) transport and mutuality and the union organization of railway workers.
Images acceptable to censorship
“They were images of independent photographers, plus four of the star of photojournalism of the time, Luca Comerio, who had nevertheless received the green light of military censorship, and which aimed to underline the non-bloody aspect of the conflict” explains Giordano. A war that cost Italy 600,000 deaths among the combatants and almost as many invalids, out of five million enlisted (one seventh of the Italian population at the time). “Only starting from 1916 will the work of freelancers be replaced by that of photographers and cameramen of the Italian Royal Army and of the Supreme Command, for a more organic propaganda image of the conflict”.
Music for Peace
They are photos that are distant in time but that have a lot to say to those who observe them today with images coming from the East in their eyes.
On the sidelines of the exhibition Saturday 21 May, at 4 pm, chamber concert “Music of War and Music of Peace from the Belle Epoque to the first postwar period“, By reservation until seats are exhausted: the soprano Raffaella Lee and the piano duo Sugiko Chinen and Luca AM Colombo interpret pieces from the era at the turn of the First World War and inspired by the theme of the dialectic between war and peace that transcends that historical period to go as far as our actuality. The program includes music by JS Bach, V. Bellini, C. Debussy, F. Poulenc, M. Ravel, O. Respighi, FP Tosti and Neapolitan songs from the first post-war period.
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