Between 2023 and 2024, the Homecoming exhibition cycle has explored the concept of identity in relation to places, viewing the idea of “home” as a return to the origins, a rediscovery of an artist’s own culture or roots. The exhibition entitled Solstice, featuring the work of Claudine Doury, curated by Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci, closes the cycle, taking us – through the pictures of the French photographer – on a voyage of discovery of ancient rituals but also of the troubled and restless world we are living in right now: the issues affecting relations between mankind and nature; the interaction between present and memory; the creative, revolutionary power of femininity; the fine, almost imperceptible, line between transition, loss, change and new beginnings.

As an empathetic and sensitive traveler who, in the last several decades, has extensively documented regions like central Asia, Crimea and Siberia, as a photographer of great talent and winner of the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 1999, for more than a decade, every June 21, Doury has set out on a voyage that has taken her from St. Petersburg to Maloyaroslavets in Russia, and then to the island of Lake Ives in Bielorussia, to Kaunas, Vilnius, and the Polish and Latvian farmlands, to document the rites of the solstice.

Called Kupala by the Slavs, Kupalès by the Balts, the night of the solstice is a traditional celebration with roots that go deep into the pagan feasts linked to the forces of nature and the cult of the sun, an event that welcomes and celebrates the brief periods in which the skies of the north achieve twilight but never darkness. Forgotten by most of the Western European world, the pagan rituals of the sun, rooted in centuries of history, are still greatly revered in the northern regions of Eastern Europe. Doury illustrates them with mysterious, delicate photographs, on the borderline between reality and the dreamworld, to evoke the invisible forces that move through these places in a night that seems endless and that promises new beginnings, celebrating the expressive and spiritual power of the light.