What is destiny? A moment, a sudden turn of the eye of a seagull that opens its wings among the garbage when it has spotted food. Or the leap of a cat among leftovers from a tavern and papers thrown in a corner of a landfill. Or the foot of a curious man who, in the same landfill, moves small and old cardboard boxes, flat, that look like books. But they are not books: they are the containers of photographic plates. Negatives, in short, on glass, as was once in use, at the dawn of the widespread diffusion of photography.

Emerging from nowhere, after a hundred or more years, on the island of Cherso and today, cleaned, restored, scanned, brought back to life, those images give us the time and atmosphere of an era that was called beautiful, when it was not thought that everything would dissolve in a world disaster, such as the war, the Great War. And it is indeed the island of Cherso that appears and shows itself in its liveliest corners, such as in the harshness of the rocks that belong to it and smell of sage, but they are also the many interiors of houses (still on Cherso?) with young men, with graceful and elegant ladies, with distinguished children, the result of "well-off" families. They are faces and glimpses created by a curious photographer, perhaps not a professional (in the sense of the trade) but very skilled and, technically, very prepared. One might think of a beautiful villa in Cherso, yes, on the island itself, perhaps abandoned for years, which then finds a new owner who has it emptied to restore it and, who knows, no one who cares to check the attic, so everything ends up in the landfill. Including the slabs. And it's not just Cherso: Trieste after the great storm of 1911 that destroyed the Bagno Buchler, the floating one, with the children looking at the destroyed wood adrift; or even a couple of color photos, avant-garde for the time, taken with a (very expensive) system that only a technician can know and use, emerge to make us see in all its beauty our old lantern or a young woman with a flower arrangement on a windowsill.

“It took that little foot (and the intelligence) of the curious Mr. Muskardin in a landfill in Cherso, to recover everything. It took, then, a meticulous lover of vintage photography and, at the same time, an attentive scholar of the sector, such as Claudio Ernè to work on it. It took, finally, the Regional Institute for Istrian-Fiuman-Dalmatian Culture so that, from what that moment of fate seized on the fly had decided should survive, a volume (and an exhibition) emerged, as rich in that world that was as sober with a linear elegance as black and white (but it is never black and white) and that small scrap of color can give. But in a moment of great excitement and activity, in a doubling of spaces for Julian-Dalmatian culture between the building in via Torino, increasingly a place for exhibitions, studies and data collection, with historical archives, libraries, a future art gallery with a cabinet of prints, geographical maps and photographs, and the area of ​​warehouse 26 dedicated to household goods and the new museum, the “Cherso” operation is part of the Institute's tasks: recovering, preserving and valorising every piece of memory, every segment of culture of those lands that saw Rome, accompanied Venice and, then, after another war, the last (last?) lost a large part of their people forced into exodus.

The volume “Cherso in posa. Un archivio fotografico ritrovato”, published in collaboration between IRCI and Poligrafiche San Marco di Cormons, will be presented on Friday 1st July at 17.30:8 pm at the Istrian museum in via Torino 31. At the same time, the exhibition “Cherso. Un archivio ritrovato” will be inaugurated in the exhibition spaces on the ground floor, which will remain open until 10.30st July and can be visited, with free admission, every day from 12.30:16.30 am to 18.30:XNUMX pm and from XNUMX:XNUMX pm to XNUMX:XNUMX pm.

Piero Delbello
Director of IRCI of Trieste

Source: IRCI. Regional Institute for Istrian-Fiuman-Dalmatian Culture – 30/06/2022