Press Release     

5 December 2009 – Double inauguration in Samedan, Upper Engadin: Margherita Lazzati’s “Reflex on the Road” photographic exhibition and the Mineralbad&SPA centre.

Milan, September 2009 - 5 December 2009, the Palazzo Mÿsanus Hotel in Samedan in Engadin (Switzerland) will provide the setting for the inauguration of  “Reflex on the Road”, Margherita Lazzati’s first personal photographic exhibition in which “REFLEXES” are tied up with the idea of  "reflections", a looking within, or beyond; for those who know how to look... at sunlight’s special gifts. A mirage, often, is the image of a world turned upside down”.

A member of the creative staff in a communications agency, Margherita Lazzati lives and works in her home city of Milan. She loves travelling and has always been an enthusiastic amateur photographer.
She has taken part in numerous photographic contests, both in Italy and abroad, and her work has won her prizes and special mentions from judging panels and sponsors. She has contributed to collective exhibitions, and some of her photographs have been published in magazines and periodicals. She does not use post-production techniques on any of her photographs.

www.margheritalazzati.it

The venue for the exhibition is the eventeeth-century Palazzo Mÿsanus , described as a  “Hôtel avec musique et culture", which overlooks the old part of Samedan, one of the most ancient towns in Upper Engadin region of Switzeland. This “Hôtel de charme” was  recently renovated with the aim of offering its guests a feel of times gone by: stone floors and Swiss pine furnishings, combined with modern comfort. Three of its 18 rooms (which include single and double rooms, rooms with sitting rooms, and mini-suites) offer wheelchair access.

www.palazzomysanus.ch

Another much-awaited inauguration is set to coincide with the photographic exhibition: the opening, to the public, of the Mineralbad&SPA centre. Located opposite the Palazzo Mÿsanus, the centre has a wonderful backdrop: set between sky, land, churches and mountains, it is, for Engadin, a priceless attraction.
Mineralbad&SPA Samedan thanks to the design by architects Miller & Maranta, is Switzerland’s first “vertical” spa centre. Spread over three floors, it has niches, pools and labyrinthine corridors, leading to an open-air pool on the roof, under the starry sky.  
 

www.mineralbad-samedan.ch

The catalogue of the 13 photographs on exhibition at the Palazzo Mÿsanus has been produced in the form of a calendar (for 2010), which Margherita Lazzati has chosen to dedicate to the Associazione Veronica Sacchi (AVS) . This association, whose mission is to undertake and support cultural and social activities that harness the energies of young people, will receive the proceeds of the sale of the calendar. The main activity of AVS and its volunteers is clown therapy, offered to hospitals, orphanages, old people’s homes, communities for the disabled, prisons, nursery schools, or wherever there is a need for a smile.  AVS also organises humanitarian projects abroad.

www.veronicasacchi.it

Information and press office:
Giovanna Pasini - TML Comunicazione
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“Reflex on the Road” by Margherita Lazzati

It is a wonderful feeling to know that we can see things that others can’t. And not just see them, but catch them, and hold on to them. Perhaps in a puddle, or in the reflection (here we come to the idea of reflections tied up with the reflexes of the person seeing and taking the picture) of a pane of glass, or in an everyday bus window.

Margherita goes around and sees these things. We, devoid of these reflexes, go around just see things (if we do even that), without ever noticing that the most banal and frequently seen sights are, in reality (reality?), a host of different images, differentiated from each other by countless factors: light, shadow, sun, rain, mist, smoke... Margherita, on the other hand, goes around and notices these things. 
 
She notices, in London, that someone has painted a portrait of Samuel Beckett on a wall (copied from a photo funnily enough), and so, every so often, she goes back to see what is left of the wasted face of the creator of Godot. So doing, on one occasion, she even found him in the company of a dog!

She notices that a car’s windows reflect a glacier, or frame one of those eternal peaks; that a cathedral is reflected in a puddle, or in the façade of one of those unnerving  skyscrapers that all seem to be made of fragments of sunglasses.

But there is also something unsettling in Margherita’s images. In the sense that they make us stop and think – and that is often an unsettling activity in itself. Think, for example, of the experience of seeing  a row of skyscrapers reflected in a small lake in a very definite and likely place, like New York, and then a similar row of skyscrapers reflected in an improbably similar lake in a place like Dubai. Some other place – that Margherita has seen.

Mario Perazzi (journalist and art critic)

"REFLEX on the Road"

If a photograph presents us with a perfect image of a fragment of reality, and that reality remains unchanged over time, then the photograph, pure and perfect, has not crossed the boundary into art and remains a simple document.

On the other hand, if the photographer has, even for a second, grasped a subtler, more complex reality and allowed that to transform and transcend the object simply seen so that the image, more than just a representation, becomes a means of entering a new and different reality that “he” alone has captured and stilled for all time... then the photograph becomes something else – it becomes art.

This is what Margherita has done. Her "reflexes" capture a reality that is reflected elsewhere. It is this concealed reality that Margherita helps us to discover – an “elsewhere” she leads us into.


Liana Castelfranchi (Professor Emeritus of art history)