The Mutande of Barga Exhibition almost ready

Put simply, mutande are everywhere in Barga, shouting out our secrets from clotheslines and drying racks strung in full sight on nearly every home; but the moot understanding is that they are not supposed to be seen.

Few artifacts of our material culture say more about us — more about our bodies, stripped to their last shield against the naked truth of age and physical decline, more about our most intimate acts and fantasies. For that very reason, the expectation is that we will not observe them, in any meaningful way. We will not “read” them as would an anthropologist or a voyeur.



Over the course of a lifetime in a town as small and densely built as this, neighbors come to know each other more intimately than do many husbands and wives in the transient suburbs and anonymous highrises of the contemporary urban world. Over the progression of years recorded by their mutande, the Bargagiani absorb an infinitely detailed and intuitive version of the portrait that compels Keane; they grow ever more closely acquainted with their neighbors` acquired habits and inherited pasts, their loves won and lost, their joys and sorrows.

They are bound, tightly, in the contract symbolized by those colorful banners waving from every home, the contract that says, in effect, “va bene, I can hang my secrets out before your windows, let them take the air and sun, because you know me — and I trust you not to look.” Frank Viviano 2005

Full article and lots more images here