Photo by © Giulio Piscitelli for Emergency

The news took the whole world by surprise. It left us motionless, shaken and disoriented on a summer day when we least expected Gino to leave us like that.

To trace the relationship between the Festival and the non-profit world we have to go back twelve years, when we started this adventure by hosting the works commissioned to photographers by some non-governmental organizations. We had the goal, as we have now, of giving a voice through images, to the many humanitarian workers, men and women who in every corner of the planet work every day to bring positive changes to society.

EMERGENCY was one of the first organizations we worked with.

In 2012 we exhibited the images of Mario Dondero and the doctors, nurses, cultural mediators, patients he had portrayed starting from the city of Palermo, accompanying us in the daily activity of the EMERGENCY Poliambulatorio, which offered free health care to migrants (with or without permission of residence) and to residents in a state of need.

In 2014 we exhibited the work of Simone Cerio who told us about the experience of the first Italian resident in general surgery to go to a war hospital to finish his studies, thanks to a partnership with Italian universities initiated by the organization itself.

Finally, in 2019, the project chosen to celebrate EMERGENCY’s 25th anniversary: ​​Zakhem | Wounds, in which Giulio Piscitelli meets the war victims of the surgical centers of Kabul and Lashkar-gah, in Afghanistan, and talks about those who have always paid the highest price in conflicts.

We are very fond of EMERGENCY and the staff we have collaborated with over the years and we asked them to do something in memory of Gino, to say goodbye in our own way: showing images that can speak to consciences.

During his speech on the occasion of the inauguration of the Piscitelli exhibition, Gino spoke about this project: “We have chosen to celebrate these twenty-five years by showing everyone, through Giulio’s photos, what EMERGENCY has been doing since the beginning. By treating the victims, year after year, we have understood one simple thing. Whatever the weapons, whatever the reasons, war always has the same face: death, wounded, people suffering. It is by facing the suffering of hundreds of human beings every day that we have begun to develop the idea of ​​a community in which relationships are based on solidarity and respect. A society that can do without war forever “.

Happening in such a particular historical moment, this exhibition is intended as a warning not to look away but to continue to support the daily operational and awareness-raising work of EMERGENCY, one of the organizations that with determination has decided to remain on the ground in Afghanistan to continue to fulfill its mission: to offer free and high-quality medical-surgical treatment to the victims of wars, landmines and poverty.

We at the Festival are with you and by your side.

In 2018, Giulio Piscitelli visited EMERGENCY’s Surgical Centres for War Victims in Kabul and Lashkar-Gah, Afghanistan.

He met war victims who continue to face public indifference after 18 years. He gave them names and faces, and discovered their stories.

They are stories where violence punctures daily life without warning. They are stories that reveal the wounds – zakhem, in Dari – left by war.

Shell and shrapnel wounds take centre stage in the photo exhibition because, ultimately, war begins with them.

Deeper wounds are also revealed, however – like the fear and exasperation that never leave you. You have to learn to control them, while everyone else in the world seems to be unaware of it all.

Giulio Piscitelli shows the Afghan people’s strength. His shots transport you into a world that is illuminated, almost unreal – a realm outside time and space. The true nature of war is that it is everywhere and never-ending.

His work has made these wounds comprehensible, simple, powerful, and eloquent.

Zakhem is a story everyone will understand and that now, more than ever before, has to be seen.