Opening: 19 July 2023 at 7.00 pm, in the presence of the author
Five countries, thousands of kilometres across the world’s hotspots where ‘history unfolds’, and a galaxy of faces, communities, and places – both famous and forgotten – that bring the story of the world to life. A journey spanning over four decades in search of reality, from the suburbs of San Francisco to the villages of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Ecuador, via the ‘places of his roots’ in Italy.
This is the journey of the American photojournalist of Italian descent, Lou Dematteis, recounted in the anthology *Five From One. Five Countries, Five Stories*, curated by Claudio Domini and Paolo Pisanelli, with exhibition design by Francesco Maggiore. The exhibition opens on 19 July 2023 at 7.00 pm in the Sala Tabaccaia at the Castello Volante in Corigliano d’Otranto, in the presence of the artist, and will remain open to the public until next autumn.
“Five From One” forms part of the “Visioni del Sud” exhibition programme accompanying the 20th edition of the Festa di Cinema del reale e dell’irreale. The exhibition brings together for the first time five different series of photographs from five different parts of the world (Italy, Vietnam, Ecuador, Nicaragua and California), taken by Lou Dematteis between 1972 and 2003, spanning his entire professional career, comprising a total of around one hundred representative images.
‘Five from one’ forms part of the focus that the 2023 Festival of Real and Unreal Cinema is dedicating to De Matteis, this year’s special guest, which includes several screenings of documentary works directed by the artist or in which he features.
The exhibition is one of the events organised as part of the ‘Festa di Cinema del reale e dell’irreale’, the festival which for twenty years has been promoting documentary film and perspectives on the realities of the world through the audiovisual arts, and serves in part as a preview of the project ‘A journey back. Un viaggio di ritorno’, the major exhibition due to open on 6 December 2023 at the Museo Trastevere in Rome, dedicated exclusively to the photographs taken by De Matteis between 1972 and 1980 during his ‘journeys to his roots’ in Italy.
