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Passaggi a Meina
Portraits in debate...
At the end of the nineties, the European Drawing Foundation (Adami Foundation) chose as its premises the small museum in the historic park of the Villa Farragina in Meina, on the Piedmontese shores of Lake Maggiore. This was the moment, when the memories of the site’s literary past cast their spell.
Most of the cultural milieu had passed through here during the nineteenth century: “If it should befall that you possess a heart and shirt” wrote Stendhal, “then sell the shirt and visit the shores of Lake Maggiore”. Nietzsche too was unable to resist the Lake’s charms, and during a sojourn in Stresa while working on Daybreak, he saw how in autumn light the lines of landscape transformed the lake into a vision.
In this venue of long ago passages, the European Drawing Foundation began its activities inaugurating, in particular, the series of Ekphrasis summer seminars. The seminars have become, since 2000, a yearly venue to reflect on drawing, questioning its essence and exploring its origins; a moment in which to think of drawing as a moral value and as a means of reflection in the practice of art, music and philosophy. All this was started with the idea that inspired the creation of the Foundation, which was set up by a group of friends (Valerio Adami, Daniel Arasse, Luciano Berio, Jacques Derrida, Carlos Fuentes, Emilio Tadini and Saul Steinberg) with the aim to preserve that very conception of drawing that the new aesthetic trends had started to neglect.
And now every summer, as in the days of the Grand Tour, Meina becomes once again the destination of philosophers, poets, writers and artists who come and meet at the Foundation, making the hours and days go by with their passion for dialogue, debate and exchange.
This is what the portraits by Denis Masi in the following pages are about:
framed by his camera the faces of the Foundation’s so many guests, deep in thought or carried away in heated discussions, reveal a portrait of a place of dynamics, contemplation and reflection.
Prof.ssa Amelia Valtolina,
Department of Arts, Fine Arts and Multi-media,
Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Bergamo,
Bergamo, Italy
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