A photo album for one hundred years of School
On Saturday 9 April 2022 the exhibition A photo album for a hundred years of School opens at Palazzo Tadea, in Spilimbergo, at 11.00 am, which traces the history of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli through images taken from its vast archive. Made in collaboration with the CRAF-Centro di Ricerca ed Archiviazione della Fotografia (Center for Research and Archiving of Photography), the exhibition tells the origins, the most significant moments, the current events and the works that have made the School famous all over the world and it is relevant that another reality of excellence of Spilimbergo, the CRAF, guaranteeing the quality of the printing and rendering of the images, some even prior to the birth of the School.
The exhibition is organized by themes and was created thanks to the material preserved in the School’s Archives, which are made up, as the director Gian Piero Brovedani points out, of photographic plates, prints, slides, but also of drawings, sketches, cartoons and transparencies for mosaic.
It starts from the origins, from the reason why an institute for the training of mosaicists and terrazzieri was started, in western Friuli, in Spilimbergo: the presence of the raw material, of those stones that characterize the graves of the Tagliamento, Meduna, Cellina, and an artisan knowledge handed down in family shops and became famous abroad with the terrazzo and mosaic works made by Friulian emigrants, from Paris to St. Petersburg, from Cologne to Copenhagen, from Budapest to Marseille, and then overseas to Washington, to Buenos Aires …
One section is dedicated to the birth of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli which opened its doors on January 22, 1922. The institution had to prepare specialized workers, able to emerge within the construction sites due to their particular skills, but also to undertake their own business as evidenced by the particular case of the numerous terrazzo and mosaic companies that flourished in the United States thanks to the work of Friulians. It was they, united in the National Terrazzo and Mosaic Contractors’ Association, who financed in the 1930s the construction of a new headquarters for the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli, the building in via Corridoni which still welcomes students from all over the world. The first school, thanks to the will of the then mayor of Spilimbergo Ezio Cantarutti, was housed in some rooms of a former barracks, the Bevilacqua. Boys aged between 14 and 18 arrived there and came from nearby towns, but also from Ragogna, Pinzano and Maniago, mostly on foot or by bicycle. They finished their first year in 46, a number that increased well over a hundred in the 1930s. The great decorative enterprise of the Foro Italico in Rome corresponds to this period, where the School’s laboratory stood out not only for the quantity of mosaic surfaces created, but also for the quality and respect for deadlines (when exchanges, requests and decisions were made mainly by letter!). Scrolling through the decades through the photographs on display, we arrive at the present where the School is a multicultural and artistic center, a model of integration and exchange: young people arrive there driven by the passion for an art that knows no age and that here has been able to renew itself and keep up. with contemporaneity without betraying the knowledge inherited from the Friulian masters of the past. More than half of the students come from outside the region and more than a third are foreigners: they reach Spilimbergo starting from all over Europe and then from the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and from the East Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea. Today, as yesterday, at the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli a craft of ancient origin is taught and the students of the new millennium compared to their predecessors face greater distances in order to attend it.
Stefano Lovison and Davide De Lucia, presidents of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli and of the CRAF respectively, will open with their greeting the exhibition that talks about a timeless art, a centenary school, a territory, the regional one, and the world represented by students who are the heart of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli.
The exhibition A photo album for a hundred years of school, which is part of the events organized for the hundred years of the Mosaic School of Friuli, can be visited at Palazzo Tadea, piazza Castello – Spilimbergo, from Wednesday to Friday from 15.00 to 18.00, Saturday and Sunday from 10.30 to 12.30 and from 15.00 to 18.00. The exhibition will also be open on Easter holidays, Easter Monday and April 25th and May 1st 2022.
The exhibition ends on May 1st 2022.
7 April 2022
