Johanna Diehl: Borgo Romanità Alleanza

Johanna Diehl’s Borgo Romanità Alleanza collects three series made in Italy, each concerned with what the Fascist period left behind in built form. The title names the three bodies of work, and the book, published by Hatje Cantz in 2014, carries 71 photographs over 160 pages.

Borgo is about the model settlements—borghi—planned and built under Mussolini to carry through the regime’s agrarian reforms. The 2014 account describes many of these structures in Sicily as empty. Diehl worked through more than twenty of them with a large-format camera, in a visually pared-down register that lets the settlements appear as ghostly theatre sets: halls meant for party gatherings, triumphal arches. The series connects the settlements’ utopian claims with their later emptiness.

Romanità stays in Rome and examines the materials and imagery of the capital’s public buildings from those years. Marble and frescoes of martial tone were made to argue that the regime’s lineage ran back to ancient Rome, and the atmosphere of ministries and congress halls, as the book sets out, was shaped by that argument. Alleanza looks at churches built during the dictatorship, where Diehl finds the accommodation of church and state written into the lofty, formal language of the architecture itself.

The three series answer one question from three positions: the empty settlement, the official interior and the church. Texts are contributed by Christin Müller, Miriam Paeslack and Falk Haberkorn; the volume is designed by Wiebke Rosin, measures 240 by 319 mm, and is printed in German and English. For collectors who follow photography’s long argument with Fascist-era architecture, the book earns attention because it treats ideology as something built—expressed through buildings, materials and political imagery—and because it holds three building types, and three kinds of use, within one sustained look at a single period.

Under Mussolini planned model settlements called borghi were constructed throughout Italy to imple­ment fascist agrarian reforms. Particularly in Sicily many of these structures still stand empty. In her vi­sually pared-down series Borgo, Johanna Diehl (* 1977) uses a large-format camera to document over twenty of these utopian settlements, portraying them as ghostly theater sets, with buildings designated for party gatherings and triumphal arches. In her subse­quent series Romanità she examines the materials and imagery of public buildings in Rome from this period. Marble and martially intoned frescos illus­trate the fascist historical lineage as dating back to ancient Rome—an aesthetic still dominating the at­mosphere of ministries and congress halls in the cap­ital. In Alleanza the photographer finds architectural records of the unholy alliance between church and state in the years of the dictatorship, as expressed in the lofty, formal language of churches constructed at this time.

Designed by: Wiebke Rosin
Texts by: Christin Müller, Miriam Paeslack, Falk Haberkorn
German, English
September 2014, 160 Pages , 71 Photos
hardcover
240mm x 319mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3879-8

Publisher page editorial text:
| Potemkin villages among the pines: striking photographs that capture the stony aesthetic of Mussolini’s propragandistic architecture
Under Mussolini planned model settlements called borghi were constructed throughout Italy to imple­ment fascist agrarian reforms. Particularly in Sicily many of these structures still stand empty. In her vi­sually pared-down series Borgo, Johanna Diehl (* 1977) uses a large-format camera to document over twenty of these utopian settlements, portraying them as ghostly theater sets, with buildings designated for party gatherings and triumphal arches. In her subse­quent series Romanità she examines the materials and imagery of public buildings in Rome from this period. Marble and martially intoned frescos illus­trate the fascist historical lineage as dating back to ancient Rome—an aesthetic still dominating the at­mosphere of ministries and congress halls in the cap­ital. In Alleanza the photographer finds architectural records of the unholy alliance between church and state in the years of the dictatorship, as expressed in the lofty, formal language of churches constructed at this time.

Publisher source ↗