Mia Storia
Margherita Lazzati's collection of photographs, My Story with Samuel Beckett at Portobello will be exhibited in Forte dei Marmi, Italy from 2 April to 5 June, 2011. This new photography exhibition, sponsored by the Region of Tuscany, the Province of Lucca, and the municipality of Forte dei Marmi, and promoted by the cultural organisation Il Magazzino del Forte, constitutes an important recognition for Margherita Lazzati.
Thirty colour photographs, printed in a large format and mounted on aluminium, trace the story of Margherita Lazzati's encounters with Samuel Beckett, whom she came across in London, depicted on an Alex Martinez mural in Portobello.
The exhibition bear witness to four years of photographic encounters and will take place in the atmospheric setting of the eighteenth-century Fortino. The Fortino, in addition to being the home, since 1997, of the Museum of Satire and Caricature, also has a large exhibition space where it stages, alternately, exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.
It is a story that, in that period of time, became a sort of life and death experience, as described by Margherita Lazzati: Captivated by the intense gaze depicted on Alex Martinez's mural, it was inevitable that, as time went by, I would identify myself with his "Godot": he was there, on that wall, and I, each time I went to London, felt that he was waiting for me. It was a meeting of gazes, without words. Or rather, the words were, in a way, the clicks of my camera. Each time I came, I found him slightly altered, corroded almost, and it was as though it was being destroyed not by the inevitable effects of the weather, but rather by the indifference of city life, busy and frantic. Until, in the end, he was defaced by other street writers. One of the last times I met him, I recall noticing a sort of graphic bruise on one eye: it seemed to signal the definitive decline of his gaze.
"My story with Samuel Becket at Portobello", is also the title of the bilingual book, edited by ready-made, the publisher that hosted the first exhibition of photographs in its own offices in Milan. It contains thirty colour images, to which various others have also contributed: Anna Ferrante (who also wrote the captions for the photographs in the form of Haiku poems), Gabriele Miccich¨, Alessandro Mininno, Maurizio Panti, Mario Perazzi, and Simone Baudo. The book is distributed in bookshops by PECORINI Srl Editori e Librai (www.pecorini.com).
Self-taught photographer Margherita Lazzati (b. 1953, Milan) has developed an eye in capturing a certain nostalgia. Her passion for photography and travelling has brought her to many places where she captures the feeling and atmosphere of what she sees. Margherita lives and works in Milan, Italy.