Thirty of them moved to the inauguration of this exhibition of Photos by Luigi Toscano organized by CRIF, Monday July 11, in Paris.
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Challenge for time and barbarism, their gaze cloves you, avoided by a light circle which seems to come from the interior. It is the reflection of the flash, but it gives these faces in close -up a form of unity, as a sign of recognition. All seem to say: we were there. The forty-two portraits of Holocaust survivors, produced by Luigi Toscano, will remain hung on the gates of the Luxembourg Garden, in Paris, until August 7. Monday, July 11, around thirty of them were able to move for the official inauguration of this exhibition organized by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), and see them discover with the family their own image was nothing banal.
At the origin of this project, “Lest We Forget. Let’s not forget”, an injunction taken from a poem by Rudyard Kipling of 1897, a question that has tapped the German-Italian artist since the rise of the ‘ Far-right in Germany, in the mid-2010s. The AFD (Alternative Für Deutschland) program, anti-immigration party, homophobic, anti-Semite with a neonazi tendency, caused a shock to this fifties born in Mainz of Sicilian parents. “I said to myself:” And I, what can I do? “” What can the Holocaust survivors of all this think? “Self -taught, son of a worker and elder of seven children, the photographer, director and plastic artist writes this project of portraits, of which at the beginning no one wants.” I have approached so many institutions! I did not have money. I was done at the door saying to me: “Luigi, we invest in the future, not in the past!” “, he explains to the world.
The adventure, started in 2014, finally led this world this Artist with the appearance of biker, pepper and salt catalog, the tattooed right arm of the word “liberta”. Exhibitions in 28 cities, in kyiv, Lviv, New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Berlin or Vienne, as evidenced A book of photographs, Lest We Forget (Panorama, 2020). These meetings marked him for life. “Survivors called me. It was so strange. The first was called Hart Sommerfeld, a survivor of Auschwitz. I was speechless. He ended up saying to me: “So, can I participate or not?” “The first museum that trusts him is the Holocaust memorial in Washington. In turn, the CRIF wanted to mark the 80 e anniversary of the Vel’d’Hiv ’roundup, the July 16 and 17, 1942, by funding with other partners the French component of this original artistic survey, welcomed by the Senate.
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