Marina Malabotti Photographer

The exhibition Marina Malabotti fotografa. Uno sguardo pubblico e privato, (Marina Malabotti photographer. A public and private glance) curated by Giacomo Daniele Fragapane, is dedicated to a figure who has wisely combined ethnographic and anthropological study with personal aesthetic research in photography.

The work of Marina Malabotti, a Roman artist who died prematurely at the age of 41 in 1988, is rediscovered in a place of particular significance for her, a museum for which she has felt such an affection as to make it the subject of a precious and innovative study in 1980, through a project which remained unfinished and unpublished, whose goal was to document a year of activity of the National Gallery.

The exhibition, divided into two main sections dedicated respectively to the project on what was then the National Gallery of Modern Art, titled Un anno in Galleria: etnografia di uno spazio artistico (1981) (A year in the Gallery: ethnography of an artistic space 1981), and to the ethnographic studies conducted in the field, Indagini sul terreno: tra documentazione e sperimentazione (1970-1984) (Investigations on the field: between documentation and experimentation 1970-1984) , introduces for the first time an articulated synthesis of Marina Malabotti's photographic activity, integrating the completed and unfinished projects into a path of 170 images, in an attempt to highlight continuity of the themes examined and the photographic method pursued, between an ethnographic study of the popular world and “active” observation of an artistic space.

The Italian South between the Sixties and the Eighties is the main horizon crossed by Malabotti and which she shares with her husband, the anthropologist Francesco Faeta. She collaborates with him through her own photographs, documenting the implications of ethnographic studies conducted in the area.

Malabotti is especially fascinated by the symbolic and ritual aspects that mark the life of the small communities of Calabria, Sicily or Campania, seen in popular festivals or funerary rituals, alongside the female and child condition, domestic life and the relationship with the land. A universe both distant and familiar to us, which emerges today from these strongly evocative images.