At MUSEC, Museum of Cultures of Lugano, https://www.mcl.lugano.ch, Janurary 27 2021 the exhibition “Namad. The felts of Iran and Central Asia" from the collections of the Sergio Poggianella Foundation and entrusted to MUSEC himself with a loan for the conservation, promotion and enhancement of the duration of twenty years, together with an original Turkmen yurt from the early XX century. The exhibition will be open to public through September 5 2021. The curatorship of the exhibition and its catalog (in preparation) is entrusted to Imogen Heitmann. Part of these felts were exhibited in the exhibition "The origins of abstraction. Felt along the silk road ” edited by Sergio Poggianella and Enrico Mascelloni, in February-March 2001, in the Contemporary Arts and Culture gallery in Milan. See catalog:
http://www.fondazionesergiopoggianella.org/it/fondazione/sergio_poggianella/cataloghi/catalogo/87

Art? The Thousand Faces Of The Shaman. Foreword by Sergio Poggianella.

To grasp the meaning of a book and the author’s weltanschauung is an extremely complex matter. Reflecting on the title "IN SEARCH OF THE KEEN EGO; the thousand faces of the Shaman "chosen by David Bellatalla for his book, I believe I have identified the admirable synthesis of the spirit that has animated his research from Eurasia to Australia, in the most remote, reached places, with the most varied means available: airplanes, trains, trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles or on mule or reindeer and above all on foot. The aim was and remains to testify through accurate ethnographies what, with the disappearance of traditions, remains of the ancient shamanic practices. Regarding the choice of the subtitle "The Thousand Faces of the Shaman" I like to venture the hypothesis that it was suggested to Bellatalla following the viewing of the shamanic artifacts of the Sergio Poggianella Foundation and after the examination of two publications on the spot, in the which a part of these paraphernalia appears to have been compared to some of Kandinsky's masterpieces. The two catalogs refer to the exhibition "Kandinsky the artist as a shaman" organized in Vercelli in 2014 and that of "Wassily Kandinsky. Everything starts from a dot”, traveling in Brazil between the end of 2014 and 2015: see the related news on this page.

In a unique exhibition in Hungary, at the Türr István Museum in Baja, paraphernalia (shaman caftans, drums, headresses, ritual sticks and other objects of art) of the Sergio Poggianella Foundation are confronted with archaeological artefacts made available by seventeen Hungarian museums.So visitors can make an extraordinary journey into the ancient history of shamanism and in coming into contact with the different worlds of the shamans can realize how they live the nature around them, how they relate to the sun, the moon, the billions of stars and death and life in the afterlife.

The event is supported by the Foundation Sergio Poggianella, Italy, which has lent seventy rare photographs of the artist.

Jordan Jordanov has preferred to intensify his research in Mongolia and Albania, but also on places in Bulgaria, in fact even more hidden and inaccessible, such as prisons and mental hospitals, where alienation is produced and cultivated. Photos by Jordan Jordanov are found in the collections of the photographic section of the National Library of Paris, the Zango Gallery in Munich, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, USA, Sofia National Art Gallery, galleries and private collections in Italy, Bulgaria and others.

Participations: gold medal in Münster (1970), Gold Medal of the Bulgarian Biennial of Photography in Sofia (1983), Grand Prize of the Biennial of Photography in Sofia, Bulgaria (1987); his photographic projects were financed by the Swiss Pro Helvetia Foundation - Bulgarian Prisons (1994), current Albania (1995) and Mongolia (1998).

The shamanic mirror and the Ad Libitum sound sculpture.

By Sergio Poggianella

An extraordinary opportunity for comparison between aesthetic visions and ethnographic realities, are offered by the exhibition of Michele Spanghero, at TRA Treviso Ricerca Arte, in which the installation of a sound sculpture, consisting of nine organ pipes fed by a medical machine for pulmonary ventilation, short-circuited with a toli (round mirror) belonging to a shaman from northwestern Mongolia. In such a context which roles does the shamanic mirror play in dealing with the sound installation of Spanghero? What suggestions, affinities, similarities and interpretations spring from this new confrontation that arose from a brainstorming between the artist and the exhibition curator? The two objects, the mirror and the machine, symbolically the first and materially the second, have the task of treating and keeping the patient alive.

Siberian Buriati shamans, from whom the bronze mirror comes from, believe that is the loss of the soul that causes the illness of a human beingand one of the main tasks of the shaman is precisely aimed to recover it. The toli (round mirror) - like the other shamanic parphernalia can count on a guardian spirit - performs different functions according to the specific cultural contexts: besides protecting the shaman from evil spirits by means of divination, it is aimed at the welfare of local believers in shamanism, is used to predict luck, to cure and possibly heal people.The thaumaturgical effect originating from Spanghero's work of art is added symbolically to the virtues attributed to the mirror used in shamanic healing practices.

 2017

Sergio Poggianella “Silk: from material to spirit", (edited by) Vo Quang Trong, Expanding Boundaries: Ethnicity, Materiality and Spirituality, 13th Conference of of International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism, Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, Academy of Sciences, (Hanoi) Vietnam, December 1st – 4th, 2017 

Teatro Tenda, Raossi of Vallarsa and at Teatro Comunale Sant'Anna, from 14 to 31 August 2016.

Mountain Life Day. On 20 August, 2.45 pm at the Teatro Tenda of Raossi, HUNT IN THE WORLD, exploratory route for children aged from 6 to 12 year, by Sergio Poggianella and Micaela Sposito.

The workshop will allow the younger audience, in their own autonomy, to face the exhibition path of the carpet exhibition BORDERS AND BATTLES in a playful mode borrowed from the "treasure hunt": following the images collected in a special poster, they will have to recognize the fragments of the geographical representations and landscapes taken from the carpets exposed in the exhibition " Borders and Battles ".Every detail (a country, a monumental building, a face, an object) is associated with a brief narrative, with the aim of soliciting a reflection in an intercultural perspective.

The event is supported by the Foundation Sergio Poggianella, Italy, which has lent 70 photos of the artist Garo Keshishian. The exhibition is organized by Academy of Photography “Janka Kjurkchieva.”for the seventh edition of the Month of Photography.

Born in 1946 in Varna, on the Black Sea, Keshishian has devoted himself to photography since 1976. A committed artist, one of the greatest photographers of Eastern Europe: numerous awards that have been attributed to him in European Union countries and in the United States and in Japan.

For thirty years he has stolen photos recalling the social unease of the people living in his land, in the difficult passage of Bulgaria from Soviet influence to Western-style democracy: Gypsies, military workers, steel workers, and who, just for a photo, accidentally landed in his studio in Varna.

2015

Sergio Poggianella, “Un paesaggio del sacro. Lo sciamano del Riparo Dalmeri” in XXVI Valcamonica Symposium, Prospects for the Prehistoric Art Research, Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici, Capodiponte, 9-12 settembre 2015

A trip through the work of Wassily Kandinsky showing the roots of his thought, the strong influence that his art will have on future generations, his relationship with spirituality and popular culture. «Tudo Começa num Ponto» (It all starts from a point), promises - and creates - a dip creative universe of one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century. More than 150 works and objects, including objects shamanic rituals Sergio Poggianella Foundation, to trace the origins of spiritual and artistic research of Kandinsky. For the first time, thanks to the initiative of the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil (CCBB) and the Russian Museum, a major exhibition in Brazil, for a year, will make a stop in Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo. #KandinskyCCBB

This event is the most important Festival in its field, and the longest lived. The Festival has been produced for a quarter of a century by our partner, the Fondazione Museo Civico di Rovereto (Civic Museum Foundation) in collaboration with the review Archeologia Viva. A full schedule of films, debate and conversation awaits us in Rovereto (Auditorium Melotti, Mart and Museo Civico conference rooms) and Trento (Muse conference room). To celebrate the event and pay tribute to the faithful public of archaeologists and fans of archeology, FSP exhibits an exceptional find: an animal-form ritual cup from the I-V century Mochica culture in Peru. The Mochica jaguar will be in Rovereto, in the foyer of the Melotti Auditorium, for just five days from 7 to 11 October 2014. #auguriRassegna.

At the Arca at Vercelli, in the area once of the church of St Mark, 22 masterpieces by the father of abstract art from the Russian State Museums will be shown, together with 16 shaman ritual artifacts from Eurasia and today in the FSP (Sergio Poggianella Foundation) collections. A production by GAmm Giunti with the City of Vercelli and Russian Museum, scientific collaboration by the Culture Museum in Lugano, documenting how in early years – partly by contact with the Siberian peasant family traditions, and also via his ethno-anthropological research – Kandinsky was inspired by shamanism, making us think that from these studies originated his intellectual development towards abstraction as a form of spirituality.
www.mostrakandinsky.it

More than 600 drawings, most unpublished, define and document the activity of the architect Virgilio Marchi, rightly considered a major Italian scenographer of the last century: he designed scenes for films by Bonnard, Matarazzo, Blasetti, Brignone, Genina, Rossellini, Germi and De Sica. This precious collection of ink and pencil drawings on drafting paper is a part of the FSP endowment; now the items are listed and await compilation of a digital analytical catalogue. On this basis, we intend then to design a multidiscipline research program on Virgilio Marchi.

To see the collection and wishing to join the research design team (as an agency, company or person), please write to info@fondazionesergiopoggianella.org