Lucia Veronesi e Valentina Bonifacio
La fortuna interiore (The Inner Fortune)
04.01.2021 – 05.01.2021
Lucia Veronesi e Valentina Bonifacio
La fortuna interiore (The Inner Fortune)
04.01.2021 – 05.01.2021
La fortuna interiore (The Inner Fortune), 2020
26”07′, colors, stereo sound, 2020
Directors: Lucia Veronesi e Valentina Bonifacio
Video editing: Lucia Veronesi e Valentina Bonifacio
Animation: Lucia Veronesi
Film Shooting: Lucia Veronesi e Giuseppe Drago
Audio editing: Valentina Bonifacio e Lucia Veronesi
Audio post-production: Marian Alexander Mentrup
In April 2017, during a brief visit to Puglia, Lucia interviewed the 93 year old photographer Lisetta Carmi, a pivotal figure of the Italian artistic scene in the twentieth century. Born in Genoa to a family of Jewish origins, Lisetta Carmi achieved world-wide fame as a pianist and photographer, before founding one of the first Ashrams of the West in 1979, tucked in the countryside of Cisternino, in Valle d’Itria.
From that interview with Lisetta our journey began.
The word ashram comes from the Sanskrit āśrama, which means “spiritual exercise.” In the Hindu religion, Ashrams are places isolated from urban space, where one can meditate and rest before continuing one’s existential journey. The practice of tirthayatra, or spiritual pilgrimage, has been widespread in India for many centuries, only becoming an attraction for Western visitors since the 1960s.
In the 1970s, during a trip to the Herakhan Ashram in the Himalayas, Lisetta met the person who would become her spiritual guide: Haidakhan Baba, or Babaji. After a few years, Babaji asked Lisetta and other devotees to build a temple in Cisternino identical to that of Herakhan. This task radically transformed their lives, as well as the lives of those in the Ashram’s village.
The contrast between the Ashram and the landscape is striking, and so too is the syncretism between Catholic saints and Indian gods. Observing these contrasts from afar, we became increasingly curious about the relationship between the Ashram and the surrounding territory. We began collecting testimonies from devotees who had moved to Cisternino following its foundation.
Can a utopia be affected by the territory that surrounds it? How is it modified by it?
Over the years, the devotees of the ashram coming from elsewhere have become part of the place, they have begun to inhabit it in the deepest sense of the word. They worked the land, walked it countless times, and married local people.
“The Inner Fortune” investigates the interactions that took place between the Itria Valley, its inhabitants and those who, in order to be close to the Ashram, have decided to move there.
The storyline of the documentary develops around a deferred dialogue between Lisetta Carmi and Giovanni Zizzi, the “master trullaro” – at the time a young man – to whom Lisetta entrusted the construction of the temple shortly after her arrival in Puglia. Founded on a deep mutual esteem, their relationship speaks of the encounter between two worlds and two trajectories of life that could have always remained apart. It also speaks of the profound relationship that Lisetta built with those places, with the peasants who worked the countryside around the Ashram, and with the fertility of the land.
All the interviews in the documentary were filmed between 2017 and 2018, and are interspersed with archival photos reworked through one-step animations.
Exploring those places, we realized how the ashram was one of the many visions sedimented in the territory, how it was actually part of a larger context marked by the materialization of numerous utopias.