Don Matteo Baraldi, for years animator of the oratory of San Francesco al Fopponino and now at the head of the parish of Gesù Buon Pastore, in via Caboto in Milan (his solemn entry last Sunday), is a black belt in judo, third dan. «Judo was my passion as a boy. And it continued also as a priest ». Don Paolo Bettonagli, from the parish of Sant’Eufemia di Teglio (Sondrio), plays tennis instead. And if Don Alessio Batti, parish of Madonna della Guardia and Montale in Levanto (La Spezia), dominates the waves of the Riviera with his surf, Sister Annika Fabbian in Sandrigo (Vicenza) ranges from football to volleyball. Stories and testimonies of faith and sport. They are some of the portraits of A sound mind in a sound body, Stefano Guindani’s photographic project, until November 26 in the Leica Galerie Milano space, in via Mengoni 4, a stone’s throw from the Duomo. Priests and nuns in religious clothes, photographed throughout Italy, engaged in various disciplines, from the most popular to the most curious, such as water skiing, boxing or footgolf.
One of the photos of Stefano Guindani’s “Mens sana in corpore sano” project at the Leica Galerie space in Milan: Don Matteo Baraldi on the tatami – © Stefano Guindani
“The idea came to me once I was on vacation in Leuca – says Guindani -: I saw some nuns playing volleyball and I didn’t have a camera. An emblematic vision that has remained in my heart. He remembered the photographs of the great Mario Giacomelli of the priests in the seminary. Years later, while working on a project for a car manufacturer in Sicily, I met some nuns to whom I told about my idea of showing men and women of faith as we are not used to seeing them. They told me about one of their sisters (from the small testament of St. Francis), Sister Daniela Cancilla, former professional footballer, in Gubbio. I started with her. A black and white photo, with the nun dribbling. From there a tam tam started that allowed me to build a network of stories throughout Italy. A project that I care a lot about ». Thus Guidani (Cremona, 1969), a great international photographer of fashion and portraits of actors and celebrities, but also of social and urban reportage, with his Leica SL2, showed “who is really behind men and women of faith”, underlines Denis Curti, curator of the exhibition. “With A sound mind in a sound body, Guindani, starting from the Giacomellian suggestions of the early sixties, embarks on an ideological mission aimed at outlining a visual story of the religious today ». And he does it – adds Curti – “transporting them to the universal level of sport”.
Sport and religion – writes the president of Coni, Giovanni Malagò, in the preface of the book (Sagep, euro 18) that accompanies the exhibition – “they are united by unavoidable values, a shared ground where pure and authentic feelings germinate”. At the Leica Galerie, among others, the images of Don Marco Foschi playing basketball in Igea Marina (Rimini), of Friar Andrej Kulba ready to get on a mountain bike in the countryside of Rome, of Don Paolo Papone “suspended” during a climb on the Matterhorn, of a group of priests who meet on a beach volleyball court in Milan. Guindani, with a believer’s eye, admits that this work “has left him with the image of a Church more open than we think.”
«I carry with me the awareness of those who manage to bring the word of God outside the walls of the church. I am reminded of the story of a priest, engaged in the Rogoredo wood in Milan, now in Brazil, who had come to celebrate mass in the skateboard field, among the boys who went there, they go in search of drugs. I haven’t photographed him, but he gives the sense of this work. And of what I see around the world, in the missions in Central and South America, of how priests manage to bring comfort to everyone ». Even with a ball or a judo move.
A photo and 651 words.
