In Rome My generations’, the underground culture of Giancarlo Soldi

The exhibition ‘My generations’ – underground culture between the USA, France and the United Kingdom from the collection of Giancarlo Soldi will be inaugurated next Tuesday, 19 November, from 6.30pm to 9pm at the Studio Stefania Miscetti in Rome (via delle Mantellate 14).

‘My generations’ presents a wide and varied selection of testimonies, produced between 1944 and 1976, coming from the eclectic collection of director, producer, writer and screenwriter Giancarlo Soldi. The exhibition, through a journey of images, words, sounds and videos, offers an unprecedented cross-section of the counterculture of the sixties and seventies, between the United States of America, the United Kingdom and France, with particular attention to the beat generation movement, to psychedelia, underground phenomena and French May.

Among the ‘finds’ kept by Soldi, protagonists of the initiative, the dummy of a book rejected by Italian publishers, with forty negatives of the beat generation, some unpublished; beat generation magazines such as Beat Scene and City Light Journal; American underground magazines such as Berkeley Tribe, The Other, Helix; English psychedelic magazines such as Oz and It, with related posters; photos, flyers and posters from the Fillmore East in San Francisco; posters, iconic photos, flyers and magazines from May ’68 in Paris; posters, photos and specials from Time, Rolling Stone, Life, Observer, Telegraph, from Woodstock to Kathmandu; San Francisco underground comics.

(Adnkronos) – “When Annamaria Gandini called me, she said: ‘There’s still something I have to give you. I found another box, Giovanni wrote your name on it. Were you looking for something from the Beat Generation? It’s there! -Soldi explains. my story. This interest grew over time, without me realizing it because comics were the dominant thought.”

“Still a minor, in the early seventies, in London I went around the underground editorial offices, “It”, “Oz”, “Frendz”, and, for a few pennies, I bought packs of back issues, convincing myself that I too was a young man rock rebel. Over the years, I have always cultivated this passion, photos, magazines, flyers, posters, fanzines -Soldi further explains- Comics were the main collection and the counterculture artefacts risked remaining buried, unorganised, in my bookcases, but the “legacies” continued. So, about ten years ago, I made a decision: at all costs, to save this “Archive”, using my energies to save these “finds”, these “poor Film Papers”. unreleased archive files, tapes that, when I listen to them, magazines that, when I touch them, excite me, and I am happy thinking about all the connections, all the stories that each object contains”.

“I realize that preserving such materials, private Super 8 films, photos, magazines, written correspondence, preparatory drawings, unique originals, was an unexpected gift. Something that was given to me, that I accepted and that, with my work, I try to give back. Words, sounds and images are places of the soul and collecting, studying, preserving was, for me, a form of fatal attraction that took me away from what my nature as a “collector” prevents me from doing. to even conceive: oblivion”, he concludes.