Let's start with simplicity, from the work of a lifetime which, precisely for this reason, cannot have another title but: "Martino Zummo. Memories of wanderings".

The concept of "photography" has never changed, even if everything around it has changed: tools, contexts, lifestyles and representations. Articulating the revelations that light presents to us, knowing how to recognise them and how to represent them is what an artist photographer will continue to do, perhaps with a smartphone, for one's own memory and that of others. But today most probably patience is lacking more than research; the ability to wait and invest in one's instinct which therefore cannot transform into poetics, language, style.

Martino Zummo knew how to wait. Like a true flâneur, he knew how to travel through himself, finding himself in the paths he has traveled and in the encounters he has made. The wait, together with the acceptance of the risk of getting lost, of letting go of control, have soared a vision. So today, with the "classic" approach of a clear writing of light, with that approach that is so dear to us, that he composes instant visual poems drawing only on heritage cultural and interior of a lively and curious man, his exhibition is proposed as an invitation to re-travel his long journey, letting go of the reins ourselves.

And being brought to an ancient Mediterranean ourselves, we'll experience the mythical residue of a lost identity that still touches the unconscious.

Photography was born for memory. But memory is unfaithful to the past, it is imaginative because it is impregnated with our emotion of time. In the childhood of the world we nourished ourselves with shady alleys, with silent houses inhabited by humble lives, with wise gestures that satiated the day, which deprived our ancestors of that hunger for life that never passes to us. Through Martino, a harsh but serene Mediterranean manages to calm us, reminding us that time can still be full and true. Art always shows us that mythical dimension that makes everyday life a full and true revelation.

I think of Eugenio Montale and the overbearing presence of the secret, in the words of "I limoni" that court him: "You see, in these silences in which things abandon themselves and seem close to betraying their last secret, sometimes one expects to discover a mistake in Nature, the dead point of the world, the ring that does not hold, the thread to unravel that can finally puts us in the middle of some truth".

But I know that Martino found himself in the Camus of "L'estate e altri saggi solari". For both the light hides, it has a secret and wild dimension. The stillness of the photo-graphic image encourages the seekers of the world's secret.

Anna Fici

Connected to the event is the talk on February 11, 2023 at 5:30pm, entitled Mediterranean culture through images, conducted by Carlo Baiamonte of the Collettivof with the participation of journalist Mario Azzolini.