Andrea Savorani Neri: A Visual Investigation on his Ancestors

It is an interpretation that sincerely honors me because it confirms that, at least to some extent, my images manage to evoke the themes and motivations from which they spring. The question of solitude runs through the entire history of art, but perhaps it is even more present in the history of literature. Photography has an indissoluble formal connection with poetry; both means of expression work on the basis of limits, of boundaries: the end of a line for poetry, the establishment of a relationship between presence and absence for photography. And speaking of poetry, your observation reminds me of Salvatore Quasimodo’s extreme synthesis: “Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth / pierced by a ray of sunshine: / and suddenly it is evening.” I think that loneliness as an existential condition is an essential theme, especially for photography, which, perhaps more than other practices, takes place in silence and, indeed, in solitude. At least, this is the dimension that interests me. And I fully agree when you relate the question of loneliness to the question of the fragility of the landscape. With its unique ability to captivate the observer, photography emphasizes and sublimates the fact that at a specific moment in time, places (or people) had a certain appearance, certain characteristics. But a few events or the passage of time are enough to disrupt places and balances. Perhaps I am once again insisting on a paradox: photography has the gift of capturing the moment, but despite this (or perhaps because of it), it is a perpetual reminder of the fragility of places and people.

Your great-great-grandfather was the painter Salvatore Valeri (1856–1946), who was married to Maria Lekegian, sister of the Constantinople-born photographer Gabriel Lekegian (1848/1853–1921), later active in Egypt. Please share some information about your Armenian ancestors.

I am currently working on “Cross-Looking. A Visual Investigation on the Legacy of My Ancestors Valeri and Lekegian” project which has been awarded a Creative Europe grant. The work stems from personal research into the discovery of my origins, the need to reconstruct and reactivate memory, giving new life to connections and links that have been lost, both at a family level with the passing of generations and at a collective level because they have been buried by historical events. I have always known that my great-great-grandfather was a painter who, at a very young age, emigrated to Constantinople where he spent more than 40 years painting and teaching painting. His name was Salvatore Valeri and his wife, my great-great-grandmother, was Maria Lekegian, an Armenian from Constantinople. Their lives, like those of millions of others, changed dramatically with the end of the Ottoman Empire, the advent of the Young Turks and the founding of the Republic. In 1923–1925, they left Istanbul and settled in Faenza, in the house where four subsequent generations lived, including myself. It was the hometown of Giuseppe Neri, who married my great-grandmother Italia, one of the three children of Salvatore Valeri and Maria Lekegian. I have always known this story because, when they left Constantinople to settle in Faenza, the Valeri-Lekegian family took their belongings with them, including almost all of Salvatore’s paintings. My grandfather Alessandro was the last member of the family to be born in Constantinople, in 1921. I grew up looking at those pictures, oil paintings, watercolors and ink drawings. But the passing of generations, the cycles of history, and the shifts in space had erased a fundamental element from the family memory: that Maria Lekegian’s older brother was Gabriel, who, after training as a painter in Constantinople (and perhaps in Rome), emigrated to Cairo, where he began a dazzling career as a photographer. I discovered this connection about eight years ago, when I unearthed the portrait that his sister Maria had kept among her belongings from a box in the basement. It was then that I decided to take photographs following the traces of these two intertwined and linked destinies: one ancestor was a painter and the other a photographer, both of whom emigrated at a time when the two artistic practices had a very special relationship within the visual arts.

A century later, it is still difficult for us to realize how complex the balance and relationships between different cultures were within the geographical areas that we simplify by calling the West and the East. My ambition is that the work I am doing with Cross-Looking will allow me to reconstruct the mosaic of those crucial years, of which my family has preserved only a partial and faded memory.

Photographing the rediscovery of the lives and works of my ancestors is an exciting endeavor and, as a photographer, discovering in retrospect that I had an ancestor who was a photographer more than a century ago raises profound questions about the choices we make and the invisible traces that the past leaves on the present.

There is also a historical aspect, both in a broad sense and in the specific sense of the visual arts: Salvatore Valeri has remained semi-hidden in the history of Western art, largely because almost everything he produced never left the family house after 1923; Gabriel Lekegian, on the other hand, is mentioned in every text dealing with photography in the Middle East between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, apart from the thousands of images produced by his studio, very little is known about him. For me, looking at these two figures means looking at the lives of two emigrant artists who lived between the end of one era and the (dramatic) beginning of another, a pivotal period in the history of the visual arts. This memory, now faded, could help to reconnect a heritage that is deeply common and shared between Europe, Egypt and the former Ottoman Empire. It would be very presumptuous of me to suggest new perspectives on the practice of contemporary photography. I would simply say that photography must aim to reclaim one of its oldest roles, which I believe to be highly significant: to be a tool for observation, research and reflection, created almost miraculously to remind us that the eyes are only the exposed and visible part of the human brain. My connection with this history has therefore been mainly through images rather than stories. The Valeri-Lekegian-Neri family house preserves a portrait that Salvatore painted of his wife Maria, a canvas depicting the inner courtyard of the Beyazit II Mosque in Istanbul, paintings which, together with Lekegian’s images of Islamic art and Egyptian archaeology, have always been a kind of silent memento for me. The photographic work I am doing helps me to reflect on how memory crosses generations, discovering elements that even my father Stefano was unaware of, such as the exact date of Alessandro Valeri’s death. Alessandro, the twin brother of my great-grandmother Italia, was an architect. Through Cross-Looking and with the help of Paolo Girardelli, Professor of Art and Architecture History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, we discovered that Valeri was the designer of the Bulgur Palas in Istanbul, and not Giulio Mongeri as previously believed. He died in 1920 at the age of just 33, and it was in memory of Alessandro that his sister Italia Valeri and her husband Giuseppe Neri decided to name their first son — my grandfather Alessandro Neri — born just a year later, after him.