Athos: The Colors of Faith in Turin

Athos: The Colors of Faith
Exhibition of photographs by Stratos Kalafatis
Curation: Aphrodite Economidou and Enrico Debandi
Opening: Sunday, September 20, 2015, 18:00
September 20 – October 25, 2015
Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, Via della Consolata 1bis, Torino, Italy
Tuesday – Saturday: 15.00 – 19.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 19.00
Monday: closed
Admission is free
Visits outside opening hours and guided tours by appointment: tel. +39 347 0103021

The cultural association Piemonte–Grecia, Santorre di Santarosa, in collaboration with the Hellenic Foundation for Culture and the Cultural Association of Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, presents the exhibition of award-winning Greek photographer Stratos Kalafatis entitled Athos, the Colors of Faith. The exhibition, a production of the Educational Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, will be inaugurated with the artist present, Sunday, September 20, 2015, at 18.00, in Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana and will run until October 25, 2015 as part of Spirituality 2015 Festival in Turin. Parallel events are planned during the exhibition run. After Turin, the exhibition will travel to Rome and Trieste in 2016.

Parallel events:
Round table “Il Sacro Senza Tempo” on Mount Athos and asceticism in general. Friday, September 25, at 15.30, Circolo dei Lettori di Torino, Sala Grande. Participants: Enzo Bianchi, Brother Antonio Belpiede, Giorgio Boatti, Protopresbyter Iossif Restagno, Stratos Kalafatis.
Concerts of Byzantine Music with the Irini Pasi Ensemble.
Lectures on Byzantine History and Byzantine Art.

“Men are not born on the Holy Mountain. They are drawn to Athos by their faith, their need, their curiosity, or their desperation. There, initiated into a life of asceticism, they uncomplainingly take their turn in a relay race to death whose finishing line is a place in the ossuary of the monastery. The same race in which the baton has been passed for a thousand years from abbot to elder and monk to novice without distinctions. Because Monasticism is earned, not inherited, in this test of patience.

I don’t really know what brought me to the Athonite Republic in January 2008. It might have been the constant encouragement of my friend and colleague, Arsenios, a graduate of the Athonias Academy, or perhaps a decision to test my conviction that this was not a place you could assimilate in photographs. There was no particular starting point – I’d already reached the half-way point in my life, in my images, in my relationship with the Holy Mountain I’d been visiting since the late Seventies.

I returned from my first trip to Karyes and the Athonias Academy rapt and secretly happy with what I knew was still to come. The 25 journeys and 200 days and nights that followed would set the tenor for a good part of the next five years.” (From the artist’s preface to the catalogue)

Stratos Kalafatis was born in Kavala in 1966. Today he lives in Thessaloniki, photographs, teaches and organizes activities related to creative photography. He has completed long-term photo projects, such as “Archetypal Images,” “Diary 1998-2002”, “Saga,” “the Archipelago” and “Athos – The colors of faith.” His books Archetypal images (1999), Omonia 2000 – Travel to the Navel of Athens (with writer Philip Philippou – 2000), Diary 1998 -2002 (with foreword by Christian Caujolle – 2004 ). www.stratoskalafatis.com

Catalog: Agra Publications, 216 pages, introduction by N. Xydakis
Information: afrodite.contact@gmail.com

Under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Greek Embassy in Rome, the Region of Piemonte and the City of Turin, sponsored by Minoan and Aegean Airlines.