
Francesco Jodice
Forte del Gavi, Gavi (AL)
May 30 - September 7, 2019
The Black Corsair and the revenge of Gavi was born from a year of research by Francesco Jodice on the landscape, the cultural and social history of Gavi. Jodice, artist and photographer, whose works are present in important international museum collections and whose work has been presented in numerous Biennials, pushes his photographic research out of pure representation and documentation. The result is a process in which the images and stories evoked are articulated in a dialogical form, telling the places, their past and their distinctive elements.
For this exhibition Jodice photographed the architecture, landscapes, monuments, hills and cellars, investigating the vernacular anecdotes and characters that have marked the history of Gavi and Novi Ligure. In his research, the artist came across the work of Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (Genoa 1909 - Gavi 1987), an important classical composer, one of the fathers of the soundtrack of Italian cinema, who chose Gavi as his chosen land. Lavagnino worked in the late fifties and seventies on hundreds of original soundtracks, including Orson Welles' Othello, as well as many B-movies of Italian popular cinema, such as Ercole against the tyrants of Babylon, Maciste against the vampire, Gungala, the virgin of the jungle, and many others, without ever leaving Gavi: a Salgari from the world of music.
The works of Francesco Jodice - bas-reliefs born from the unexpected fusion between the landscape photographs taken by the artist for this project and the protagonists of the posters of the films set to music by Lavagnino - are the result of the superimposition of two worlds: one real, the other fantastic . Taken together, they seem to transform the Gavi into the fictional set of a film populated by cowboys, vampires, pirates, mythological figures and seductive women. Jodice, through a pop and low-fi collage operation, transfigures the castles, valleys, mountains and waterfalls of Gavi into dreamlike and unforgettable places. Playing with kitsch he stages these cult characters in “other” places, altering their context, to transform photography into a contemporary tool of multidisciplinary storytelling. The result are nine large-format photographs-sculptures, three-dimensional collages born from the conceptual union between landscape and fantasy figures, but they are also a stage in the long process of reflection that Jodice has been conducting for years on nature and the sense of the history of images. , of the influences and osmosis between the object-photography and the society in which it is produced as a cultural device and apparatus.
The title of the project ironically opens up to the fantastic images protagonists of post-war Italian cinema, to whose success Lavagnino's work greatly contributed. Il Corsaro Nero e la vendetta del Gavi consists of a photographic exhibition created for and with the Forte di Gavi Polo Museale del Piemonte, a musical performance - born from Jodice's interest in Lavagnino's music, which led him to activate a collaboration with the Niccolò Paganini Conservatory of Genoa and the “Romualdo Marenco” musical body of Novi Ligure composed of 45 elements - and an installation at the La Raia farm, headquarters of the La Raia Foundation. The musical performance will take place on the opening day in La Raia, bringing back the music of Gli specialisti (1969, directed by Sergio Corbucci) and Death comes from the planet Aytin (1967, directed by Antonio Margheriti) in the Gavi landscape. The transcription of the scores was edited by Maestro Pietro Leveratto under the direction of the Niccolò Paganini Conservatory of Genoa.