Dino Ignani. 80's Dark Rome

The “dark” community in the shadowy and glittering, underground and blatant Rome of the 1980s, between music and fashion. The core of the exhibition hosted at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere is the cycle “Dark Portraits”: portraits that photographer Dino Ignani has dedicated to the young people who animated the nightlife of the time and, in particular, the places and events linked to the dark scene, a street culture identified above all by the look and symbolic value attributed to the color black.

The photographs that make up the cycle were taken between 1982 and 1985 in the capital’s historic and new nightclubs, video bars, and all those venues that offered musical and theatrical events dedicated to those who identified or identified with the “dark” movement and area. Approximately two hundred of the more than five hundred images made, mostly in black and white, have recently become part of the permanent collections of the Capitoline Superintendence of Roma Capitale: the exhibition is therefore an opportunity to present to the public this body of work recently acquired by the Museo di Roma in Trastevere.

Other works made by Dino Ignani in the same years are also on display in the exhibition, for example, portraits dedicated to poets of the Roman scene, such as Dario Bellezza, Patrizia Cavalli, Amelia Rosselli, and Valentino Zeichen. Their faces and bodies are placed side by side in the exhibition with those of girls and boys who in turn seek unconventional forms of expression, such as Porpora Marcasciano, today a historical figure in the LGBTQ movement and at the time still a university student chosen as the first model for a project on the Roman trans community. Also among the exhibition's protagonists is the Greek-born US musician and singer Diamanda Galás, portrayed in January 1985 during one of her Roman concerts at Teatro Spazio Zero.