Photographic exhibition by Raffaele Montepaone curated by Melissa Acquesta.

The event exhibits portraits of the women of Calabria and dialogues with the exhibition of selected and exhibited ancient documents from the Institute Archives that offer the opportunity to investigate the relationship between tragic events such as calamity and war and the monumental heritage of the territory .

Through correspondence, reliefs and drawings we discover how Monuments and Churches were sometimes places to be abandoned and from which to keep away and others to reach for help, comfort, shelter, refuge.

The works of Montepaone which portrays the women of Calabria, who have always been true guardians of the places, dialogue with the precious documents.

In the Calabrian hinterland it was women who had the keys to the Church, who took care of guarding and animating the symbolic places and heart of the community, these places then, often, were monumental heritage, incarnations of beauty.

LIFE is the photographic project by Raffaele Montepaone, a young artist from Vibon, who came to life in 2007 with the first shot in Stilo, a small village in the Ionian Reggio Calabria, where Raffaele began his research into an anthropological partner.

The project consists of two series of works Faces and Hands. Faces and Hands furrowed by time and fatigue, old inhabitants of abandoned villages who seem immersed in an immemorial past are the subjects that fascinate the artist and represent true beauty for him.

Full of dignity and vitality despite the wear and tear of time are the Calabrian centenarians that Raffaele eagerly searches for and represents with a very personal monochromatic interpretation, so that, even when there is no setting in a work, the observer is still able to perceive it and breathe it.

Its protagonists become almost mythological figures, far from history, far from the observer and the black and white increases their distance.

LIFE is also a document on the uses and customs of the old Calabrian generations and their links with the earth, metaphorically visible in the furrows of the epidermis. His are not only representations of rural life but intimate portraits in which an entire experience emerges, evocative images of past times, characters who seem to have survived the cultural apocalypse of consumer society that force us to stop and reflect.