Museo Novecento celebrates the Day Of Memory with the project Il viaggio.

In the morning at 11a.m conference at altana with the title Mario Mafai e Antonietta Räphael negli anni del regime with the exeptional exhibition of a work by Mario Mafai from the series Fantasie.

The conference Mario Mafai and Antonietta Räphael negli anni del regime, curated by Elisabetta Stumpo (MUS.E, Mediation department), will trace the history of the Mafai spouses, affected in the most varied ways by the abuses of the dictatorship, from the demolition of their Roman home in Cavour street, to the need to hide with the whole family in the aftermath after the enactment of racial laws. A conference focused on the artistic story, never as in this case closely linked to the personal story of the couple and many other artists united by the same fate. The meeting is part of the Shoah of Art, a project organized by ECAD and born to place the emphasis on the Shoah in the artistic life of the country, enhancing, within public and private collections, works and artists who, during Nazi Fascism, were marginalized and persecuted.

In the afternoon at 3.30p.m installation-reading in the external loggia. A group of students of the Michelangelo’s Liceo will read live Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi together with the Art Director Sergio Risaliti and the producer Giovanni Micoli.

The installation-reading dedicated to Se questo è un uomo will take place in the external loggia of the Museo, where a plaque recalls the complex of the former Leopoldines as a place of memory of Florence. There the students of Liceo Michelangelo will read the chapters of the text by Primo Levi, accompanied by the director Giovanni Micoli and the artistic director of the Museo Sergio Risaliti, creator of the initiative. Each of the performers will carry on the chest a star of David, in memory of the “brand” with which the Jews in Nazi Germany were indicated. “We can not forget,” said Risaliti, “especially today that intolerable demonstrations of fascist regurgitation and aberrant removals emerge in our democratic societies. There is an art before the Holocaust and there is an art after it. Art, poetry has survived along with memory. The silence referred to by the great philosopher Adorno, condemned the artists to say horror”.

Museo Novecento: a place of memory

A history of almost eight hundred years, that of the complex of the former Leopoldines, that among the various events and handovers – from shelter for pilgrims to institute for destitute young people until transformation into a school in the post-World War II period before being converted into a museum – includes a dark page, the one that in the years between 1943 and 1944, sees it requisitioned by the German troops of occupation. Inside the structure were detained and interrogated the workers who joined the strike of March 1944, called by the Committee of National Liberation, 338 of them were dragged to the railway station of Santa Maria Novella and deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen. Of the 338 deportees, only 64 survived.

The cultural association La Stanza dell’Attore

The cultural association The Room of the Actor founded by Giovanni Micoli in 2009 in Florence, was born from the desire to give institutional role to the activities and passion for the theater, the teaching of acting and the writing of texts to be staged and the production of videos. In these years the association has collaborated with various private and public institutions including: Regione Toscana, Comune di Firenze, Comune di Prato, Comune di Scandicci, Ospedale Pediatrico Meyer, Space S.p.A., Biblioteca delle Oblate, Giunti Editore and Giunti Progetti Educativi, Serre Torrigiani, Liceo Classico Michelangiolo and Metastasio theatre of Prato, Arval, Patrizia Pepe, Mus. and Florence, Cesvot, Auser.

Mus.e Association. in collaboration with Arterìa and La Stanza dell’Attore.