For Holocaust Remembrance Day 2021, the Brera Academy of Fine Arts offers an exhibition entitled “Muselmann”, a tribute to Aldo Carpi, curated by Prof. Barbara Nahmad and Prof. Stefano Pizzi with an introductory note by Prof. Vittoria Coen, in collaboration with the Shoah Memorial and the Sons of the Shoah Association.

Aldo Carpi, professor of painting at Brera, due to a tip-off from a colleague, was arrested by the fascists and then deported first to Mauthausen and then to his most tragic “Kommando”, that of Gusen, where he met the tragic figure of the “muselmann”, a word that in the Lagerszpracha jargon of the camps indicated prisoners with starvation to the bones already in the pre-agony phase.

It is perhaps the only diary to come out of the Nazi concentration camps, one of the few “direct” documents on the concentration camps: what is striking in it is the moral strength and the intact capacity of artistic reflection. The example of Aldo Carpi is certainly a source of inspiration for the professors and students who have joined the initiative by creating a modular installation of black and white works on paper, an ideal wall mosaic, which on January 27 will be conveyed as a video of the exhibition through the Academy’s website, Youtube channels and social networks of the promoting institutions and the Municipality of Milan. The installation will soon be inaugurated in presence at the Shoah Memorial.