Hidden geographies

The exhibition, curated by Monika Bulaj and organised by ERPAC, Friuli Venezia Giulia's Regional Agency for Cultural Heritage, retraces the artist's long journey among minorities and nomadic peoples, among faiths and religions, through more than one hundred images, in colour and black and white, a journey that has taken her along borders, to sacred and shared places, documenting the social conditions of the weakest strata of the countries she has crossed: Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Africa, the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, Russia, Afghanistan, Haiti and Cuba.

Monika Bulaj's photographs highlight the invisible, the wealth that is disappearing before everyone's eyes, in those lands where for millennia people have shared saints, gestures, myths, songs, dances and gods. The persecuted minorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Christians of the East, the Sufi masters from the Maghreb to the Indies, the shamans of ancient Bactria, the last pagans of the Hindu Kush, the Tibetan nomads, the Gnostic sects of the Zagros mountains. Inhabitants of the last oases of encounter, enclaves besieged by armed fanaticism, lost homelands of today's fugitives. Places where the gods often speak the same lingua franca and where, behind the monotheisms, signs, presences, gestures, dances, shared glances appear.

Testimonies captured on the road with nomads, fleeing minorities, pilgrims.

Seeking beauty even in the darkest places, solidarity and cohabitation between faiths where bombs are placed, the cracks in the theory of the so-called clash of civilisations. A work that has changed over time, where in the beginning the intent was to document small and large religions in the shadow of ancient and present conflicts to then arrive at collecting and capturing the tale of prayers and dreams, of the many memories always centred on man's sense of the sacred.


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