*Visioni del Sud* is a project dedicated to the rediscovery, reinterpretation and promotion of the invaluable collection of images gathered from the early 20th century up to the 1950s by Giuseppe Palumbo, a scholar and intellectual from Lecce, and donated after his death to the Sigismondo Castromediano Museum in Lecce. A collection which, in terms of its scope and organisation, is unrivalled in the Apulian regional landscape and which has made its creator and his work indispensable to scholars and enthusiasts of ‘local history’.
The project begins with an exploration of Giuseppe Palumbo’s archive, thanks to a collaboration between the Institute of Mediterranean Cultures, the Sigismondo Castromediano Museum, the Big Sur communications studio, and the associations Officina Visioni and Archivio Cinema del reale. A journey through time in search of traces, public and private memories of the great photographer and the human landscapes that emerge from his photographs, a journey made up of encounters and discoveries, unpublished documents and curiosities.
Before reaching the Museum of Civilisations – Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Rome, this research project took shape in a series of exhibition-workshops dedicated to Palumbo’s work and the promotion of his archive: in 2015 at three venues in Salento – Calimera, Gallipoli and Lucugnano – and in 2017 at the Torre Matta in Otranto, a venue which, in addition to hosting the exhibition of Giuseppe Palumbo’s photographs, also hosted activities by photographers, filmmakers, artists, designers, musicians, students and local institutions, who were invited to explore, reinterpret and bring the Archive’s visual heritage up to date.
Photographing places and people is a way of caring for them, preserving them from the oblivion of time or neglect.
It is a way of understanding reality and the changes it undergoes.
In this sense, Palumbo’s work is exemplary because it captures the most authentic aspects of the culture of the time, portraying landscapes, monuments, traditions and productive activities to bring back the memory of a rural Salento moving towards modernity and sudden cultural changes, helping to pass on to future generations the value of Salento’s identity and that of a part of Southern Italy.
