Fifty years later. In the Valle dei Mòcheni with Flavio Faganello

Flavio Faganello was a passionate reporter of the Valle dei Mòcheni and of what he called 'his people'. As early as the early 1960s, he documented with anthropological flair everything that he considered essential to leave concrete traces of Trentino's history and character. This gave rise to news photographs and photo-investigations, images for tourism and for the cataloguing of cultural heritage, and others for the numerous publications of which he was author or co-author.

The best synthesis of his vocation as a 'storyteller through images' was the 2005 exhibition held a few months after his death at the International Centre of Photography of the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona and later at the MART in Trento. Four years earlier, in 2001, the artist had given the Historical Photographic Archive of the Autonomous Province of Trento a formidable corpus of images, around 400,000 photographs and negatives taken between 1960 and 2005.

The exhibition, curated by Roberto Festi and commissioned by the mayor of Palù del Fersina, Franco Moar, pays tribute to the photographer and reporter who documented with passion and philological rigour the profound transformations of a rural post-war Trentino, the years of the economic miracle and the cultural revolutions of modernity. He does so by retracing the themes that have always been dear to the artist: the protagonists of "his" valley, men and women; the landscape; festivals and traditions; work in the fields and on the mountains; the migrations of the 'klòmeri', who left the valley in winter to sell their wares in distant lands; the evocative architecture of the local farmsteads. It will be like reopening a book that Flavio Faganello has written and rewritten, and confronting it with current events.

The hundred selected photographs, many of which are unpublished and placed according to different approaches, come from the historical photographic archives of the Autonomous Province of Trento and the Faganello family archives, and will be displayed in three different locations.

At the Maso Filzerhof of the Istituto culturale mòcheno | Bersntoler Kulturinstitut, the theme of landscape and its protagonists is explored. In Casa Lenzi in Palù, the section dedicated to the 'Donna mòchena' (the Mocheno women) is re-proposed in its original 1978 conception: images of women who, in these shots, become the protagonists of the ancient history of this community. The third venue is en plein air, in the streets of the village, in the hamlets and in the woods, where some large reproductions on banners bring Faganello's shots into that natural setting that he loved so much, showing, as was in the artist's chord, "the before" - the images of the 1960s and 1970s - and the "after", that is, our present.