Field Investigations

The set of these images covers a time span of over a decade, during which various researches have taken place and have partially overlapped. The ethnographic commitment is fulfilled in certain campaigns conceived and conducted with the Anthropology departments of the University of Calabria and the University of Messina.

The first of these investigations was aimed at the popular festivals in Calabria, Sicily and Campania, and in this context, Malabotti's investigation mainly concerned the holidays of the Holy Week in Calabria, although it was intended to extend to the whole of Southern Italy.

Starting from this wide field of study, an autonomous core was then defined, concerning the festivals celebrating death and funerals in a more general sense, then merged into the volume and exhibition Imago mortis, a core presented again here in an extremely concise form with photographs taken mostly in rural cemeteries in the province of Catanzaro, between 1975 and 1976.

Ideally, two sets of particularly intense “community” portraits close the itinerary. On one side, the 1984 series entitled Le metamorfosi del tempo (The metamorphoses of time), born from a study on portraits made in San Giovanni in Fiore (CS) during the first decades of the last century, by the local photographer Saverio Marra.

Similarly, the unfinished series Il futuro delle bambine (The girls’ future), made between 1979 and 1981 in Cassari (VV) and Migliuso (CZ), presents the shot twice more, first defining its coordinates independently, then leaving the subjects more freedom in choosing their pose and sometimes asking them to exhibit an “identity object” such as the favourite page of the school textbook.