FALLING IN LOVE IN BERLIN /
by Vittorio Bongiorno
Published on Il Foglio, 17.10.2026
Is meeting someone in Berlin and falling in love love at first sight or a kind of chemical destiny? “Wahlverwandtschaften,” or elective affinities, are the dream behind a thirty-year-long photography exhibition that is finally taking shape through the work of twenty-four photographers—fourteen women and ten men—who, without ever meeting or knowing one another, captured the same image on different continents, in different eras, and in different styles. Welcome to Berlin, at Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST, the internationally renowned gallery for high-quality black-and-white photography, where the hostess and curator has created diptychs of literary memory, inspired by Goethe’s novel of the same name.
“I found myself in the fortunate position of being able to play Memory for a long time,” the hostess confides to ‘Il Foglio’ with refined elegance in her Art Deco parlor at Fasanenstraße 69, in a Berlin lulled by late summer along the quiet avenues of Charlottenburg, just a few days after the recent electoral upheavals. The group exhibition “Elective Affinities,” on view through October 23, brings together a diverse array of photographers, including, among others, the Germans Miriam Tölke and Stefan Moses, the Ukrainian Mariya Bilyan, the Pole Marek Pozniak, the Algerian-Parisian Isa Marcelli, the American Sheila Rock, the Chinese Songwen Sun-von Berg, and the Japanese Ayako Takaishi, alongside two great masters who have passed away: Herbert List and Robert Lebeck. Also featured in the exhibition are the two filmmakers Ulrike Ottinger and Wim Wenders, with two photographs from 1985 taken in Beijing and Tokyo: the director of “Perfect Days” is present alongside his wife, Donata, as is the other Japanese photography duo, Koichiro and Machiko Kurita.
Johanna Breede recounts the early days of her career as head of the photography department at the Villa Grisebach auction house, where she remained for eight years, and the sense of wonder mixed with amazement at holding originals by the most important photographers of all time in her hands: “It was an exciting and formative experience. On my desk I had prints by Irving Penn, Saul Leiter, Imogen Cunningham, Steichen, Edward Weston, Renger-Patzsch, Ansel Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and many others. I loved this work and would read between the lines of the photographs to discover affinities, and even then, the desire to create a dialogue among the subjects based on elective affinity had already emerged within me. When I later opened my small gallery, I carried that desire, that dream, with me. But sometimes I would sell a photograph, and as a result, I would be missing the pair needed to create a dialogue in the exhibition ‘Elective Affinities’.” Today, this secret dialogue unfolds with beauty and delicacy under the curious gaze of the cultured gallery owner, evoking gestures, shadows, and situations described in the novel of the same name, a masterpiece of German literature.
In 1808, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—a great poet, writer, philosopher, and scientist—borrowed the concept of “elective affinity” from chemistry and alchemy, fields in which he was a leading scholar, to develop his theory of “Wahlverwandtschaften.” He thus described the uncontrolled and entirely random attraction that causes certain substances to break away from existing structures and recombine with others, driven by deeper and equally uncontrollable forces. Goethe is sixty years old, at the height of his artistic career, and—despite being married—he literally loses his head over the eighteen-year-old Wilhelmine Herzlieb, known as Minna: he first dedicates a series of sonnets to her, then even gives her a gold ring, but the girl rejects him with a certain detachment. The Master’s heart shatters, but it magically recovers through the creation of the novel, in which he recounts that impossible love by crafting the character of Ottilia—the ethereal orphaned niece, modeled, of course, on Minna.
In the novel, the young woman arrives at the country estate of Carlotta and Edoardo, and Edoardo falls madly in love with her; then Carlotta loses her heart to the Captain, who is also a guest at their estate. Just like chemicals that recombine, the two couples break up and come back together in a whirlwind of uncontrollable passion and tragedy.
It is well known that Goethe’s tumultuous love life always fueled his writing, and this relentless intertwining of love and death transformed ‘Elective Affinities’ into what Thomas Mann—another restless giant of German literature—called “our greatest novel, a miracle of compositional happiness and purity, astonishing in its richness of relationships, its intimate connections, and its cohesion.” For Mann, Goethe was more than a spiritual father—he was a constant presence throughout the career of a writer who explored the decadence and eroticism of the bourgeoisie like no other. And in Johanna Breede’s exquisitely composed diptychs, we find precisely this: contrasts, forms, light, and gestures that seem to respond to intangible yet very evident spiritual resonances, much like those described in the novel.
“A beautiful foot is a great gift from nature, a grace that never fades,” declares the Count with great emphasis. He is one of Edoardo’s guests, infatuated with the foot of Carlotta, Edoardo’s wife, whose little shoe he would like to kiss with devotion. Immediately, the gaze turns to the corner wall at the entrance to the PHOTOKUNST gallery, where Yuriko Takagi’s shoes—photographed for a Comme des Garçons advertisement in 1995—make a playful nod to Donata Wenders’s “Red Shoes” from 2009. And what about the graceful feminine nape photographed in Paris by René Groebli in 1952, which is reflected in another nape photographed by Donata Wenders fifty-three years later, in Japan?
Goethe’s novel opens with Edoardo and Carlotta grappling with the renovation of their estate’s park—with trees to be cut down and new plants to be added—a perfect metaphor for what the four characters—Edoardo and Carlotta, their niece Ottilia, and the Captain—will find themselves experiencing as their lives take on a new form. Goethe writes this in the opening lines of the novel: “To the right, the valley opens up, and once past the vast expanses of trees, the gaze is lost in a crystal-clear distance.”
With the same gaze focused on the purity of white, Johanna Breede must have juxtaposed the “Frozen Tree”—photographed in Norway by Jens Knigge in 2015—with the identical bare tree photographed by Koichiro Kurita in Japan in 1987. And again: re-reading the scene in which, returning from a walk near the old mill, Edoardo turns to look at Ottilia, who “followed him without fear or hesitation, leaping lightly and with perfect balance from stone to stone; it seemed to him as if he were seeing a celestial being hovering above him,” our gaze rests on the two photographic collages by Isa Marcelli (2021) and Miriam Tölke (2022) which, one in Paris and the other in Berlin, mysteriously and enchantingly give shape to the face of the same girl.
Those most surprised by these uncontrolled and uncontrollable elective affinities are the artists themselves. Mariya Bilyan describes the gallerist as “a magnet for like-minded artists; it was her brilliant eye that brought us all together so easily. “Today, that’s a rare occurrence.” Donata Wenders shares this view: “What a precious gift Johanna has given us!” says the German photographer of the gallery owner-alchemist’s work. “Finding my images—which I know so well—placed side by side like brothers and sisters with other photos by my colleagues was like meeting family members I hadn’t known before. What a joy and what a sense of belonging.”
Berlin-based artist Kathleen Alisch conveys the same feeling, thrilled to have her work displayed alongside that of Japanese photographer Koichiro Kurita: “It feels like an extension of my intense periods in Kyoto. Perhaps it’s a deeply rooted interplay between chance and intention, which ultimately brought us together in his darkroom in Japan and now on this wall.”
Chemistry and chance are the surprising paradox that underpins the entire exhibition: photography captures the moment—“there are only coincidences,” said Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1971—and yet it seems to have its own predestination. Very different photographic styles connect with one another not as chance encounters, but as if they already knew each other before meeting on Johanna Breede’s walls.
“In fact, for me, elective affinity is above all a dialogue within a completely unforeseen and unexpected situation,” adds Donata Wenders, “born of something that drew me in, that I couldn’t explain, and that I could never have planned in advance.” “Sometimes an image appears in my mind even before I encounter the subject in reality,” says the Paris-based Japanese photographer Ayako Takaishi, “it almost seems to me as if the photograph already existed before the moment I took it, as if time had folded in on itself for an instant.”
“When I started taking photographs,” says Isa Marcelli, “I realized right away that I wasn’t looking for technical perfection, but rather that I preferred the traces of a certain imperfection. I’m interested in the idea of vulnerability: we are unique and singular, but also fallible human beings. And when I take a photo, I’m no longer solely responsible—chance becomes my ally.”
Chance also plays a major role in the ink drawings of Songwen Sun-von Berg, who was born in Shanghai but lives in Berlin: “When I arrived at the opening, I was surprised to see my drawings next to the photos by Jens Knigge and Ayako Takaishi. I didn’t know them before, and all three of us had worked completely independently.” Jens Knigge also emphasizes how deep his connection to chance is, referring to his photograph taken on the frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia: “I was struck by the deep bond that the local population—predominantly Buddhist—forms with the lake’s waters. I photographed ice formations and abstracted the images by inverting their tones, thus creating space for free interpretation and imagination.”
Time and space, therefore, break down and reassemble on the walls of Johanna Breede’s gallery, and the photographic memory of these extraordinary artists now becomes a collective unconscious—one that cannot be controlled or planned.
And during the very same days when photographers who have never met are drawn to one another, two musicians from vastly different backgrounds also experience an equally uncontrollable elective affinity that produces music perfect as the ideal soundtrack for this dreamlike exhibition: Anushka Chkheidze and Robert Lippok, she 29, he 60, are releasing their second collaborative album, “The Sky Was Out of Tune,” a dreamlike 25-minute piece published by the prestigious Morr Music label.
“It was composed for the Festival of the Future at the Neue Nationalgalerie in November 2025,” says Lippok, “we wanted to create something dense yet unstable, in which noise, harmonies, and melodies would coexist, yet each would retain its own identity.” Anushka Chkheidze, born in Tbilisi, Georgia, is considered one of the most promising talents on the contemporary Caucasian music scene, while Robert Lippok has written some of the most significant chapters in Berlin’s musical history: together with his brother Roland, while they were still living in the former GDR, he created that wild sonic blend of electronic, post-rock, and ambient music, first with the duo “Ornament und Verbrechen”—named after the title of the famous essay written in 1908 by architect Adolf Loos—and later with the brilliant To Rococo Rot.
“We met in Tbilisi in 2019, during an improvisation session at an ambient music workshop. Anushka played the piano, and within a minute, I knew I wanted to work with her. The clarity, simplicity, and beauty of the chords and melodies she played immediately touched my heart,” says Lippok, as we stroll through the intersection of Kreuzberg and Neukölln—the two most creative and multicultural neighborhoods in this city that never seems to sleep.
For him, too, the image Goethe borrows from chemistry fits perfectly with his conception of music: “The collaboration with Anushka was completely unplanned, and yet from the moment we started, it seemed inevitable, as if our sounds already knew each other in some way before they met. That’s why I hold dear the phrase by Donna Haraway (the American feminist theorist, ed.) ‘make kin’—to create kinships, alliances, and mutual responsibility.”
The “Elective Affinities” showcased by Johanna Breede reveal the wondrous enigma of connections between human beings, just like the music produced by Chkheidze and Lippok. And, as Goethe writes in the final pages of his novel: “If one of the two had been confined to the far end of the house, the other, instinctively, without meaning to, would have gradually drawn closer to him. Life was an enigma to them, the solution to which they could find only together.”
https://photography-now.com/exhibition/178511
I SERENISSIMI DI SICILIA. /
THE VENETIANS OF SICILY /
photo courtesy of Ferdinando Scianna
published by Il Foglio, 5.9.2026
Scianna and Emma Dante with Buttafuoco in Venice: photography and theater in a city whose history has never grown old
by Vittorio Bongiorno
Venice is a mirror, a fish when viewed from above, and so the best way to arrive would be from the sea, as Thomas Mann suggested. It’s almost as if arriving in the lagoon city were an experience, a rite, rather than a stop on a tourist itinerary: water, a primordial tangle of islands, gold, embroidery, stones smoothed by the waves, fierce seagulls, and shadows concealing destinies. In this port city—a sweet and bewitching trap, foul-smelling yet resplendent—three wandering Sicilians have landed: travelers and voluntary exiles, not for tourism but for work, for an award, for government service: Ferdinando Scianna, Emma Dante, and Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. The first with an exhibition on the Jewish Ghetto, right inside the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo; Emma Dante, who received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the start of the summer; and Buttafuoco, who is the skilled helmsman of this Biennale—theater, dance, music, architecture, art, and cinema.
Three different destinations, three different ways of losing oneself in Venice—loving it and being loved by it, each in their own way. All while remaining faithful to a single island, Sicily, which, as Buttafuoco suggests, «has never known the narrow-minded logic of a cramped courtyard because, like Venice, it too has always been in the middle of the sea.»
«I have a problem with Venice», says Scianna, who recently turned 83 and has been carrying a camera slung over his shoulder for half a century, «but I don’t think I’m the only one—we all do. The city is very demanding; it’s hard to capture it without being overwhelmed by its splendor, by its charisma». The great Sicilian photographer confesses with a hearty laugh on the occasion of the exhibition “Ferdinando Scianna at the Venice Ghetto” at the historic Ikona Gallery (through November 22): «I know few photographers who’ve managed it—like my friend Berengo Gardin, through his focus on the everyday, or Campigotto, who photographed it at night in a fantastic waywho photographed it brilliantly at night. I’ve done a lot of things in Venice, but I always got carried away». That natural charisma of the city has made many lose their heads in the past—Thomas Mann, who described its ambiguous eroticism as a trap for foreigners; Iosif BrodskijJoseph Brodsky, who made his most beautiful pages shine on its waters; and Geoff Dyer, who indulged in the wildest vernissages and cocktail parties.
«The project in the Ghetto was my last photographic workmy latest photographic work. After a site visit, I had convinced myself that, deep down, it was just a square, a small neighborhood», Scianna says with bitterness, alluding to his mobility issues, which for some time have hampered his brisk pace in pursuit of the ‘decisive moment’—that fleeting glimpse of reality to be captured through the lens. The photographer had arrived in the city in 2016 for the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Ghetto and was convinced he could pull it off, given the confined topography of that “island within an island,” by narrowing his focus down to the bare essentials. Not the entire city, not the gondolas, not the bridges for lovers, but a tiny patch of land just a few hundred meters wide: «If I get tired, I’ll rest, I told myself, it’s not even a small village—it’s a neighborhood», he continues, recalling the entire month he spent in close contact with the Jewish community. “I’ve always been deeply fascinated by the people of the community, and I carried out this work with them with great pleasure—with passion, but also with difficulty. No doorbells on Saturdays, no electricity….» His laughter rings out, genuine and sincere, as he lists the rules—not so different from those learned by the young Ferdinando, who came of age photographing religious festivals and Catholic processions for his first book, “Religious Festivals in Sicily”, co-authored with Leonardo Sciascia in 1965 when he was just twenty-one years old.
«We are children of the same madness, in a sense, and for this project I spent a long time observing a place that has lived through its own story—one that is not grandiose, but full of pain, full of events and people».
Those photos, so full of life and stories, are being presented again today—ten years after the first exhibition commissioned by Fabio Achilli, Director of the Fondazione Venezia—thanks to the tireless work of gallery owner Ziva Kraus, who is the living memory of Ikona Gallery and the soul of the cultural life of a “threshold gifted to life.a “threshold gifted to life.” «I am a messenger between the artwork and the public», says this extraordinary woman poetically of herself—a Croatian-born painter who arrived in Venice as a teenager to heed an inner voice she could never escape. «I am a prisoner of Venice», she says with irony and an almost Kafkaesque sobriety after having brought half a century of international photography to the lagoon, from Berenice Abbott to Helmut Newton, from William Klein to Gisèle Freund. «Scianna’s photography transcends—literally—it casts its shadow», emphasizes the gallery owner, who, as a young woman, worked as Peggy Guggenheim’s assistant at Palazzo Venier.
Forty years after that experience—which Kraus describes as «simple, gentle, and free of pretense»—she curated the exhibition “Peggy Guggenheim in Photographs (2016)” at his Ikona Galleryat her Ikona Gallery, as a sort of homecoming to restore the city’s memory. Just as the presentation of Scianna’s photos in Venice is for Venice.
On the walls of Ikona—a small, cozy rectangle traversed by a staircase leading to an imaginary elsewhere—Scianna’s meticulous black-and-white work seems to reflect endlessly in a mirror. Venice gazing at itself, the Ghetto square mirrored within itself, a little girl on a skateboard disappearing into the shadows of the portico. That low stone portico at the gallery’s entrance is both reality and fiction, community life and an image captured on film. A minuscule forma urbis that nevertheless rises upward, given the Ghetto’s confined dimensions, as if it were a medieval city. Yet it transforms the Ghetto’s classic low-rise houses into lagoon-side skyscrapers. In the sixteenth century, four Christian guards—appointed by the Republic but paid by the Jews—were tasked with opening the gates at dawn and closing them at night, patrolling the perimeter of the Ghetto by boat.
Accompanied by Ziva Kraus, Scianna walked for a long time at the same slow pace, ready to capture faces, gestures, reflections, celebrations, and prayers. An entire humanity encapsulated in a small square. And then, at night, in a flash, one of the most dreamlike images in the exhibition appeared before him: a light on in a window and the shadow of a man smoking a cigarette as he gazed into the infinite: «It’s one of my favorites. That figure that suddenly appeared seemed to me like an apparition from history», says the photographer, who returned to the city last year as a guest of the 82nd Venice Film Festival, starring in Roberto Andò’s documentary “Il fotografo dell’ombra” (“The Photographer of Shadows”). A year later, he still recalls with emotion the audience’s reception and laughs heartily at his appearance on the red carpet: «I was really amused to be there like an actor, with my fellow photographers teasing me. It was wonderful—a great bit of fun»It was wonderful—great fun».
«I feel as if I’ve changed, but I don’t feel that Venice has changed», confesses Emma Dante, a writer, actress, and playwright from Palermo, when asked about her relationship with the city twenty-two years after her debut at the 2004 Theater Biennale with “La scimia” and following this year’s success with “I fantasmi di Basile”, a play exploring the world of the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, the 17th-century author of “Cunto de li cunti” and the first great inventor of the modern fairy tale. «But since Venice is an immortal city and I, on the other hand, am utterly mortal, utterly frail in my little life, it seems to me that returning to Venice is always a bit like acknowledging—and therefore accepting—one’s own mortality», the director adds in a whisper. It was the same voice, choked with emotion, with which she read her acceptance speech at the Golden Lion ceremony—a speech she had written so that «I can focus on reading it and won’t start crying». In its citation for the award, the Biennale emphasized how, through her theater, Emma Dante has brought Sicily back into the spotlight, reinvigorating the great legacy of Pirandello, Sciascia, and Camilleri, along with Ciprì, Maresco, and Franco Scaldati.
«Art is an artistic gesture that is always connected«Art is a creative gesture that is always connected to its origins, to the people who accompany us, and above all to the bonds that tie us together», Emma Dante read at the awards ceremony. «I believe that theater has a very important social function—one of reflection and care for society—and so, for me, it is a way to make people think, to convey messages, but also, above all, for me personally to reflect on the injustices of the world».
“When I attended the performance«When I attended the performance of “I fantasmi di Basile”», says Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Venice Biennale Foundation since 2023, «in witnessing the actors’ skill and the carefully calibrated dramatic structure that Emma Dante’s direction sought to establish, I saw once again everything—absolutely everything—that constitutes the alchemical principle of theater. An archetype, something that delves deep». Buttafuoco, who has always had a very strong connection to the stage—he previously served as president of the Teatro Stabile di Catania and the Teatro Stabile d’Abruzzo—speaks of Emma Dante’s production with great enthusiasm: «In her work, I saw echoes of the ‘posteggia,’ Neapolitan street theater, in the moment when the two actors on stage, through mimicry and techniques of waiting and pause, reenacted what is characteristic of both street performers and acrobats, as well as the desperate and the starving. And, if we may say so in passing, under our breath, at one point they even reminded me of Franco and Ciccio. That is, the ones who truly managed to keep everyone glued to their seats, mouths agape—children and adults, the learned and the simple-minded, the know-it-alls and the maliciousthe know-it-alls and the mischievous. In short, the audience—made up of so many different faces—is captivated by this uniquely feminine ability to portray what lies at the origin and what awaits us in the end».
The President of the Biennale is a raging river—or rather, a sea in a joyful storm: even though it’s Sunday, he answers questions for “Il Foglio” from his office, which has two windows identical to those of a mosque, with the Grand Canal in front and the Giudecca across the way. And he recounts that when Pinault (the French entrepreneur and art collector, owner of the Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana) raises the Breton flag over his museum, he sentimentally raises that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in an imaginary exchange of greetings. «I live in absolute privilege, because I work every day on the Grand Canal, which is the embodiment of a history that has never grown old—that of Venice». Listening to his stories, it comes naturally to recall the verses with which his friend Franco Battiato compared Venice to Istanbul—the same palaces right on the sea, red sunsets that fade into nothingness—two sister cities sharing the same calling as a bridge between worlds and seas.
And, speaking of the success of his Biennale—among the surprises: art curated by Koyo Kouoh, theater by Willem Dafoe, music by the very young Caterina Barbieri, and architecture, in 2025, by Carlo Ratti—Buttafuoco responds with typical Sicilian understatement: «I don’t know, fazzu u me travagghiu, I just do my job» but he adds seriously that his only guiding principle is «the Biennale’s 131 years of history—that is, being a universal point of reference». The Biennale is an institution open to all peoples. And then, when asked what sound his Venice produces—the deep pulse of the city that can be heard by pressing one’s ear to its heart—he replies with a smile: «Duri i banchi», the Venetians tell me as I walk through the «“Duri i banchi,” the Venetians tell me as I walk through the calli. A warning, a lesson for me», which recalls the order given to rowers to hold fast to the benches of their ships before ramming an enemy.
«Venice is a great mirror; we see our wrinkles, the furrows of time, where we recognize ourselves as human beings», concludes Emma Dante, «it’s a different kind of water from what we Sicilians are used to. A water that speaks more of reflection than of freedom.It’s water that speaks more of reflection than of freedom. We Sicilians are accustomed to this gaze that is lost on the horizon, which no longer distinguishes things because the sea erases the future. Only the sea that blends into the sky. Venice, on the other hand, reflects who we are».
Of that magical night, when she was awarded a prize for a brilliant career—one in which her native Palermo seems, for some reason, uninterested—the director recalls «a choked voice, a powerful emotion. I remember myself as a child, receiving an important award from Mom and Dad».
All three Sicilians, once they arrived in Venice, seem to have found a home rather than just a port city. With slow but deliberate steps, Emma Dante, too, walks through the silent streets where the heels of her shoes whisper to the world: «The sound of Venice is my footsteps… it’s as if they were saying: I exist». Because Venice, as Ziva Kraus also says amid the shadows of the Ghetto’s portico, «Venice saves everyone».
