Cultural life in Durrës is increasingly vibrant and full of initiatives of great interest due to the commitment of the municipality and its institutional articulations and to the presence in Albania's second city of associations and societies that promote initiatives of great depth.
Liora Sinigaglia, art manager of the company Resolution, a native Venetian, is among the most active and dedicated people in organizing highly appreciated cultural events with great efficiency.
The most recent of its initiatives is the exhibition “Images from Asia” by Italian photographer Massimo Saretta, which opened on Friday, Jan. 30 and is open to the public until Feb. 28 in the “Nikolet Vasia” Civic Gallery of Fine Arts in Durres' main square.
The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality, the “Aleksandër Mosiu” Cultural Center in cooperation with the local Prefecture and the “Aleksandër Moisiu” University of Durrës, with the fundamental support of Ms. Alketa Tragaj, Director of the “Aleksandër Moisiu” Cultural Center, who welcomed the exhibition in the spaces of the “Nikolet Vasia” Gallery, which has always been considered the “cultural living room” of the city.
The curator of the exhibition is a first-rate expert such as Ph.D. Oltsen Gripshi art historian who is joined by Prof. Gastone Scarabello, who for many years has been following Massimo Saretta's artistic journey in his numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad .
The initiative also relies on the collaboration of photographer Griseld Hoxha, in charge of documenting and visually remembering the event, and Dr. Armela Curri, who accompanies visitors throughout the exhibition, offering support and insights.
Massimo Saretta was born in 1958 in Padua, the city where he lives and where his studio as a professional artistic photographer has been based for more than thirty years. From a young age he has devoted himself passionately to the study of the art of photography, garnering flattering success through numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Armed with his inseparable camera, Saretta has made many trips around the world, deepening technique and skill in the preparation of shots, specializing in “reportage” photography. His sensitivity has led him to fix in the shots moments of undoubted emotional appeal.
His experience in Asia began in 2000, when he started visiting this vast and diverse continent.
“Images From Asia” is not a simple photographic exhibition, but a real journey through suspended realities: a pilgrimage between light, memory and myth. In more than two decades Massimo Saretta has traversed dusty streets, crowded markets, silent temples and ancestral forests of the Asian continent, capturing 84 fragments of light, moments suspended between legend and reality. His photographs do not describe Asia, they evoke it: they make it a living presence, palpable and at the same time mysterious, a territory where the visible coexists with the invisible.
Each image becomes threshold and guardian of myth, inviting the viewer to enter a dilated time, where memory becomes experience and the present dialogues with what the world has been guarding for centuries.
“The choice of Durrës as the venue for the exhibition is not accidental- says Liora Sinigaglia- A city of port and passage, Durrës was for centuries a crossroads of commercial and cultural exchange, a landing place for merchants, caravans and travelers from the East to the West and vice versa. Spices, silks, tales, traditions and distant cultures have passed through its walls and port, leaving deep traces in the urban and collective memory of European civilization.”
In this view, the city of Durres thus becomes a mirror of values and a cultural bridge, a privileged place of dialogue between East and West. In this context, the exhibition “Images From Asia” finds a resonance not only aesthetic, but also historical and cultural. The exhibition space of the gallery and the surrounding urban fabric are transformed into a space of transit and metamorphosis, in which the visitor moves like a pilgrim between memory and present, between myth and everyday life.
Durrës is not a city to be observed only: it is a city to be listened to, breathed, traversed. Here Asia stops to become a presence, and the Mediterranean becomes a living custodian of stories and memories. Each shot of “Images From Asia” represents a unique testimony: a fragment of life captured with a gaze free of prejudice, capable of restoring the depth and dignity of each face, place and gesture. It is precisely this rare, rigorous and universal sensibility that has consecrated photographer Massimo Saretta as one of the most authoritative voices of contemporary photography internationally.
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