Mountaineering as a bold and carefree exercise of skill to share with friends. Parachuting and art as a pretext to feed the impatience to meet oneself. Photography not only as a search for the beauty of small things, but also as an instrument of denunciation. These are the lesser known souls of Guido Rossa revealed to the general public by the exhibition «Guido Rossa photographer. Even in a small thing »curated by Gabriele D’Autilia and Sergio Luzzatto at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa. On display, until February 20, 70 images of his explorations in Nepal, the Alps and the roads and paths of Liguria collected in the catalog published by Silvana Editoriale.
The protagonist is the worker, communist and trade unionist of the Fiom-Cgil killed in Genoa, on January 24, 1979, by the Red Brigades, as a “Berlinguerian spy” for having reported infiltration of the Red Brigades in the factory.
The portrait of Guido Rossa (photo Biancardi) – Publication of the Cai-Uget Turin and the cover of the catalog
Photography as a testimony
Luca Bizzarri, president of the Fondazione per la Cultura of Palazzo Ducale, explains that «the intent of the exhibition is above all to grasp the sense of the lesser known experiences of the trade unionist» as an amateur photographer, mountaineer, husband and father.
«Rossa, through photography, looks for something that can relate to her life, she looks for reasons… avoiding any kind of technical virtuosity», writes Roberta Valtorta in her essay in the catalog.
The camera, for him, was an instrument of approaching the beauty of nature and of the people he met in the districts of Genoa or in the mountains, but also of witnessing the living conditions of the communities approached in Asia and the protests in the squares of Turin and Genoa inflamed with red flags.
Riviera di Levante – Photo G. Rossa
“We must go down among men”
As Enrico Camanni writes, in the passionate speech dedicated to Rossa’s disheveled experiences, mountaineering was his greatest passion which then left room for new urgencies. The emotional trigger could have been the death of two climbing partners, during the expedition to the Himalayas, to conquer the Langtang Lirung, in 1963. Seven years later, he confided to his friend Ottavio his new vision towards the world that until then he had attended with enthusiasm and denounces “the indifference and ambition that dominate in the mountaineering environment” and the need to purify himself from the irresistible satisfaction of feeling like supermen “closed in our supportive selfishness, the only inhabitants of a planet without social problems, made of smooth and sterile walls … We must go down among the men and fight with them ». He invokes solidarity, social justice to “make our existence and that of our children valid”.
Turin, demonstration in Piazza San Carlo – Photo G. Rossa
From the euphoria of development to terrorism
The factory (Fiat, in Turin, where he entered at the age of 15, in 1949, and the steel giant Italsider, in Genoa, since 1961) for Rossa was the main training ground for political and trade union awareness and training at a crucial moment in history Italy and Genoa in the 1960s and 1970s: industrial development, the consequences on the territory, the oil crisis, political tensions, the increasingly hostile dynamics between workers and company management, up to the demonstrations in the streets and the scourge of terrorism. Fabrizio Loreto explores these themes in his essay «La Genova di Guido Rossa».
Photo G. Rossa
The bet
A breath of innovation inspired by the avant-garde experiences of Adriano Olivetti also entered the factories. Salvatore Romeo, also evoking the figure of the accountant Fantozzi, explains the productive evolution of Italsider and the changes in the organization of work and in relations with employees. Sandro Morachioli tells the “lost bet” of Eugenio Carmi, the company’s communications manager who dreamed of Genoa as the ideal city of the future. He dealt with the image of Italsider also introducing a sort of cultural revolution to “raise the after-work of the workers from recreation to opportunity” with cinema, literature, figurative arts and photography and, as Luzzatto tells in his essay “When the workers create culture ”, also with the theater and performances in the various Italian offices of the steel group where the workers acted in front of dozens of spectators.