THE BLACK ROSE

From Restitution BENINESE ART to Revelation

An epic documentation of Valletta

In 1982, photographer David Pisani embarked on a personal project to photograph the city of Valletta (Malta) and its infamous red light district of Strait Street and ‘The Gut’. What began as a photographic essay on the city’s derelict buildings turned into an epic documentation of Valletta that spanned 29 years.

Most of the photographs in the exhibition are taken from the book Vanishing Valletta, published in 2018, a sort of Maltese equivalent of the book Paris Perdu. Thirty original prints from this series are held in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The exhibition will present an equivalent number of selenium and/ or gold-toned silver prints made by the photographer. The publication titled The Black Rose consists of a collection of anecdotes about Strait Street and The Gut and including a limited-edition print.

David Pisani’s photographic work can be summed up as a relentless pursuit of the sublime and the erotic. His earliest works (c. 1980’s) already showed a deep concern with the representation of the human body, the erotic nature of places and objects as fetishism and the inevitable association to sexuality and death; themes which are consistently present in all his work.

The link between decay and architecture is most evident in his photographic essay on the city of Valletta and the red-light district of Strait Street entitled ‘Vanishing Valletta’ which was first exhibited in Paris in 1996 during the Biennale of photography: Mois de la Photo à Paris under the title “La Valette et le Grand Port – Portrait d’une

Capitale Maritime”. In the year 2000 a selection of the Vanishing Valletta archive was included in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Pisani has also produced photo essays on the city of Dubai, the conflict zones in Cyprus and the city of Kyoto in Japan.

The exhibition, The Black Rose, runs until the 25th of June at the Adrian Bondy Galerie, Paris.

MALTA

NEAPOLITAN TRILOGY thoughtless tales by Giuseppe Ruffo

On May 25, 2023, the book by Italian author Giuseppe Ruffo “Trilogia Napoletana” Magmata edizioni will be launched at Kixott. Giuseppe Ruffo is an independent curator of contemporary art, founder of the Art Turm project and GR contemporary Art. He has organised exhibitions in several cities around the world including Belgrade, Berlin, Naples, New York and Seoul and has published for Tullio Pironti Editore: Una città’ Invisibile (2021).

The book is divided into three periods: The Bile of Naples, The Earthquakes, Naples Horror. “Giuseppe Ruffo’s short stories return a narrative of the city of Naples that we can translate to any other metropolis.

As the author traverses the city slowly, changing pace, he manages to capture nuances that would otherwise be lost in the frenetic, superficial pace of everyday life and forces us readers to slow down as well. In the first part of the Ruffo Trilogy he describes to us men who come from afar, dark stories. The stories are an attempt to answer some of the questions he poses: are immigrants happy in our city ? What do they think of us ? And of Naples ?... In the second part a visceral writing, from the bottom, which returns the humus of an era, that of the post-earthquake of November 23, 1980 ... In the third part the author in a sci-fi, grotesque key tells the Naples of clichés.”

During the presentation of the book, the writer Giuseppe Ruffo is scheduled to participate with the reading of some stories, which will be accompanied by a sound environment, curated by musicians: Paolo Termini and Roberto Pugliese. Also planned is a projection of drawings in reference to the stories written by the author, by artists Raffaele Scarienzo and Salvatore Garzillo.

KIXOTT, 169, Triq il-Kbira, Mosta, Malta. https://kixott. com/events/