ITALICS presents the new edition of “Panorama” (1 – 4 September 2022) and announces the presentation of the Italics d’Oro award to the Italian artist and photographer Lisetta Carmi.

ITALICS, the first consortium in Italy to bring together over sixty of the most authoritative ancient, modern and contemporary art galleries throughout Italy, has chosen Monopoli (Bari) for the second edition of the city-wide exhibition “Panorama” curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, Curator and Associate Director of Programs, Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

“Panorama” is the special event ITALICS periodically holds in some of the most extraordinary places in the Italian landscape. After last year’s first edition on the wonderful island of Procida, from Thursday 1 to Sunday 4 September 2022, ITALICS is organizing a new itinerary in one of the most fascinating places on the Adriatic coast.

The ancient seaside village of Monopoli, in the heart of the Apulian coast along the “Costa dei Trulli”, retains a secular stratification of the history of human civilization in its ancient settlement and surrounding walls, in the land of farmhouses, centuries-old olive trees, castles and abbeys. The medieval historic center is a maze of pedestrian streets, typical chiassi – quaint narrow passageways – and ancient piazzas, a gem of popular housing interspersed with sumptuous religious buildings and splendid aristocratic homes. And right in these streets, the second edition of the city-wide “Panorama” exhibition will be held in early September of 2022. Art, architecture, antiquity and contemporary art, experiences and opportunities for further knowledge: once again, ITALICS will offer an enriching calendar of special events open to the public, happenings and side initiatives.

“Panorama Monopoli” once again confirms a unique exhibition experience. It is an extension of ITALICS, which is in a position to bring the ancient, modern and contemporary, styles, techniques and multifaceted approaches together in art itineraries designed to reveal the more authentic but obscure aspects of our country, a live continuation of the extraordinary journey launched in 2020 on the web pages of the Italics.art platform.

On the occasion of “Panorama Monopoli”, ITALICS is delighted to announce that this year’s Italics d’Oro award celebrates Lisetta Carmi, and her fundamental artistic experience and work.

Each edition of “Panorama” recognizes and celebrates an artist who has an intense relationship with the territory where the city-wide exhibition is held. The first Italics d’Oro protagonist, in 2021, was Daniel Buren, an artist who has had a very special relationship with the island of Procida for over thirty years.

Since 1979, the artist and photographer Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924) has lived in Cisternino, Puglia, where she founded a meditation community. As Lisetta Carmi herself explained, her relationship with photography began in Puglia: “I started shooting with a small Agfa Silette camera without any preparation. It was 1960, and I went to Puglia with my ethno-musicologist friend Leo Levi. We went to San Nicandro Garganico, where a group of Jewish students of the mystic and clairvoyant Donato Manduzio lived, in the Jewish catacombs of Venosa, in Alberobello. I used nine rolls to document those beautiful and interesting places. I had never taken a photo in my life.”

TheMonopoli edition of the Italics d’Oro is being awarded with the following motivation: “Lisetta Carmi is a great Italian artist who has distinguished herself with work that is well ahead of the times, and for this reason, still extremely topical today. Her photographs document subjects and realities that have rarely been shown, some of the first to use an artistic approach in documentary photography, shedding light on class tensions, gender issues, visions of eroticism and power.”