From 10 September to 8 October 2020, the 24th edition of the International Festival Isole che Parlano will host Broken Songlines, a Monika Bulaj’s exhibition created with the contribution of Fujifilm and in collaboration with the Polish Institute of Rome.
The exhibition is a series of 51 photographs that demonstrate Bulaj’s experiences with minority cultures throughout the world and will be shown in the Centro di Documentazione del Territorio in the Sardinian town of Palau.In the Middle East and the Caucasus, in Asia and Africa, along the borders of Europe, the richness of complexity is disappearing under our eyes, in those lands where for millennia people have shared saints, gestures, symbols, myths, songs, gods. The Christians of Pakistan, the Ethiopia and Iran Sufi masters, the Afghan shamans, the last pagans of the Hindu Kush and the Urals, the Tibetan nomads, the Gnostic sects of the Zagros mountains: Monika Bulaj is building an atlas of minorities and shared sacred places, the last oases of encounter between faiths, free zones besieged by armed fanaticisms, lost homelands of today’s fugitives, places where the gods often speak the same lingua franca, and where, behind monotheisms, signs, presences, gestures, dances, appear.
Bulaj describes her interest in these cultures saying “I have travelled between spiritual boundaries, in the crossroads of forgotten kingdoms, where faiths and the weakest and least defended traditions sparkle with their fragile and defenceless resistance, and their capacity for dialogue and discovery.”
On the inaugural evening of the Festival, Thursday Sep. 10 at 10 30 p.m. there will be a special reception with the fotographer who will lead a multimedia performance of Broken Songlines – Three manuscripts.
