Lucia Baldini - Michela Fregona –Anime Altrove

More than a report, it is a journey through the places, the history, the
personalities and the atmospheres of the Argentine Tango in Italy.  Like all
journeys, it is a search:  six months spent travelling from one end of Italy
to the other, pursuing the events, the nights, the thoughts of the
protagonists of a phenomenon that, after ten years of unaltered magic, has
by now become something much deeper that a revival or a fashion.
A photographer and a journalist are travelling companions on an adventure
that is delicate and surprising: an adventure given to them by the voices of
those who have been touched, swept up and caressed by the emotions and
feelings of dancing.
Like a mirror of society, tender and contradictory, that lives on the
threshold of milongas, "Anime altrove - Luoghi e genti del tango argentino
in Italia" (Souls elsewhere - The places and people of the Argentine Tango
in Italy) is released for Colombi Litografia.
We have waited a hundred years and finally, here it is: the Tango has come
home.
From the Andes to the Apennines and this time without the cardboard
suitcase.
In our beautiful Italian cities, which have become branches of  lejano
Buenos Aires,
couples embrace with the enthusiasm and mastery of porteños; instead of
hovels, they dance in places on the Grand Canal and in sixteenth century
convents; there are 'compadritos' who travel by bicycle
and irrepressible citizens who clasp together in couples to experience a
life concentrated into three minutes.
The Tango is truly everywhere.
Lucia Baldini has not been taken by surprise by this splendid revival: if
five years ago she was the first
Italian photographer to devote an entire book to the Tango, and has been the
scene photographer for  Compañia Tagueros, by Carla Fracci, as well the
author of a monograph on Frank Zappa, with 'Anime altrove' she has created a
  masterpiece of poetic imagination.
Lucia photographs the public acts of intimacy of these artists of the
embrace.
And their emotions, ideas, challenges and personal ways of living the Tango
find a place in the gallery of portraits outlined in the texts of Michela
Fregona: an intimate journey that discovers pages that are well-known and
also less well known, stories seen through the eyes of who, from beneath the
floodlights, stops for an instant to become his own audience.
Behind the scenes of clubs, places, dancers, an informal story.  Made up of
protagonists
Argentina seems far away, but the Tango is very much here, in these two
united bodies who don't want to be alone, who defend themselves from the
winds of war, misery, pain and the powerless of changing their own destiny.
If we look carefully, the Tango never really left.

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"I would like to know more about the tango,
and understand it more.
I am helped by the photographs
of Lucia Baldini and the texts of Michela Fregona.
I would like to be part of that context,
but with the spontaneity with which, as an adolescent, I used to throw
myself among friends in imitation of
the movements of the grown ups, who whirled about, confident
and graceful, watching our clumsiness
with irony and tenderness."

Goffredo Fofi