Keep the Fire Burning

Photobook exhibition curated by Francesco Colombelli, in collaboration with Centro diurno per l’adolescenza “AÏDA”

This selection of photobooks explores how myths, fairy tales, stories of witchcraft and spirituality, popular beliefs, religious traditions and traditional clothing continue to inhabit our present. The ghosts evoked are not only supernatural presences, but also cultural traces, collective memories, customs and archaic imagery that persist – often in latent form – in everyday life.
The selected photobooks recount what has been handed down from generation to generation, mainly through words, example and repetition. This fragile knowledge, entrusted to memory and the body rather than written texts, resists the passage of time but is slowly at risk of disappearing.
Although they belong to different geographical and cultural contexts, these practices share the same function: to create bonds, explain the unknown, protect and remember. This varied selection aims to bring these differences and affinities into dialogue, constructing an emotional and cultural geography that crosses borders and generations. An intimate and temporal object, the photobook becomes an ideal container for these “ghosts”, allowing them to be handled, opened, shared and disseminated, keeping alive the traces of an intangible heritage that continues to speak to us, if we still know how to listen.