Mosul, Faraway so Close – Photos Exhibition

The photographic exhibition Mosul – faraway, so close, curated by the photographer Daniela Tartaglia, presents 24 colour photographs taken in Mosul by architect Giovanni Fontana Antonelli, CEO of AMTO and current coordinator of UNESCO programme for the reconstruction of the historic town of Mosul, devastated by ISIS and by the war launched against it to liberate the city. As stated in 1856 by the renowned publicist Ernest Lacan: “[…] photography, in its struggle to arrest time, is able to resist ‘the great destroyer’, to recompose and make immortal the monuments that risk to fall to ruins: wars, revolutions, terrestrial seizures can destroy them down to the last stone, but they will live forever in the portfolios of our photographers.”
And it is exactly this last stone that G. Fontana Antonelli managed to capture amongst the ruins of the old town of Mosul, still strewn of unexploded ordnances, at the risk of its own safety. He has little time left, and possibly he will not be able of walking again in the old town of Mosul without constant armed escort, wandering amongst ravaged vestiges of homes, minarets, abandoned palaces, just driven by the inner need of bearing witness of a blatant insanity, in search for traces of the ancient beauty of the town that was once the capital of the Assyrian empire.