Fondazione Merz presents, in collaboration with the Letizia Battaglia International Photography Center, the collective exhibition Palermo Mon Amour, which will open to the public from Monday 17 April 2023 in the spaces of Via Limone 24 in Turin.

The exhibition, curated by Valentina Greco, returns the history of Palermo from the 1950s to 1992 in a story in images. A journey that reveals, through the research and intuitions of Enzo Sellerio, Letizia Battaglia, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi , Lia Pasqualino an imaginative Palermo. Five photographers, five looks, who have investigated the poetic imagery of Palermo with different feelings, recounting a city in continuous explosion, and not always recomposed in its contemporary complexity. Object of a gentle, playful, cultured, anti-rhetorical vision, which is also very acute testimony of the social scene of the 50s and 60s, full of stratified situations of misery and degradation but awaiting a possible civil and economic renaissance, Palermo undergoes the 'further assault of the '70s, of the daily events of ferocious news, up to 1992, the year in which it seemed, once again, that everything could change. In the same years, the city let itself be infiltrated by punk, student demonstrations, occupations, new theatrical productions, contradictory political life, and had its resistance in the construction of an imaginary in a constant state of exception, where writing and writing for images have been attentive observers and protagonists.

The project makes use of the collaboration of the Letizia Battaglia Archive and the Enzo Sellerio Archive.

Inserting itself in the wake of a long-standing dialogue that the Merz Foundation cultivates with the Sicilian territory, Palermo Mon Amour builds the cross-section of a city with a troubled, contradictory and crackling history of submerged energies.