On Saturday, April 6, 2024, at 11:00 am, the temporary exhibition “Giovanni Skulina. Fragments of Moments” will be inaugurated at the Museum of Riva del Garda. The exhibition presents the evocative photographic production of Giovanni Skulina, a little-known author but capable of documenting with extreme clarity the social and landscape transformations of the post-World War II period.
The exhibition is curated by Alessandro Riccadonna and Valentina Varoli and was realized in collaboration with the Araba Fenice Association of Arco and the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage and Activities of the Autonomous Province of Trento.
Giovanni Skulina was born in Arco to a family of Czech origin. His connection with photography began thanks to the activity of his grandfather Johann, who opened a shop for the sale of postage stamps, newspapers, souvenirs, and photographic articles in Arco in 1897. This connection was passed down from father to son, intertwining a family history marked by two world conflicts and various adversities that caused numerous losses and dispersals of the Skulina archive material.
The surviving photographic films date back to the post-World War II period. Skulina becomes a traveling photographer and moves to the locations of Alto Garda, taking portraits for the population and documenting the life of small communities: from processions to weddings, from communions to sports and recreational events.
With the rise of mass tourism, Skulina understands the new opportunities opened by the strong recovery of the sector and combines the profession of a traveling photographer with the more profitable one of a tour operator. In the second half of the 1940s, he founded the Skulina Tourist Guide to bring foreign guests to visit the most beautiful locations on Lake Garda and Trentino. During the tours, he takes photographs that tourists love to buy as souvenirs.
The exhibition “Giovanni Skulina. Fragments of Moments” presents about two hundred unpublished photographs taken by Skulina between the 1940s and 1950s. These photographs are valuable testimonies to enrich the knowledge of the Garda landscape and follow the development of a new visual sensitivity linked to the social and economic changes of the time.
The exhibition is an important effort in the recovery and enhancement of local photographic funds, linked to minor professional studies. The photographs remained forgotten for almost seventy years until the Museum of Alto Garda, in collaboration with the Araba Fenice Association of Arco and the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage and Activities of the Province of Trento, took charge of bringing them to light and showing them to the public for the first time.
The project on Giovanni Skulina is part of the reflection on the landscape that characterizes the activity of the Museum of Alto Garda. Photography, since its inception, has been a privileged means of documenting the physiognomy of a place and constructing a specific image of it. The MAG has placed the enhancement of photographic funds concerning the Garda landscape at the center of its cultural programming, also in relation to the humanization of the territory and the changes in society.
The exhibition “Giovanni Skulina. Fragments of Moments” will be open to the public from April 6 to November 3, 2024, at the Museum of Riva del Garda.
