MUSTANG MURAL

Most people who have seen Luigi Fieni, the Italian restoration artist, perched on a platform painstakingly helping restore murals in the Tupchen Gomba in Lo Manthang, will be pleasantly surprised to hear that Fieni is also an accomplished photographer. An exhibition of his pictures taken in Mustang over 16 years is on display at the Siddhartha Art Gallery till 12 November.

Fieni first landed in Nepal in 1999 by chance. His professor at the Ars Labor Conservation Institute in Rome, Rodolfo Lujan Lunsford, had been called by John Sanday Associates to work on the restoration of rare Tibetan frescos dating from the 15th century at monasteries in Mustang. Fieni accompanied his teacher to Nepal.

“I was 25 years old and I wanted experience,” recalls Fieni, “I couldn’t miss the opportunity”.

Fieni didn’t know how long this project would last, but after five years Lunsford left the mission and Luigi became project chief. He has been restoring these sacred wall paintings for 16 years now, and documenting his work through photographs.

“At first, I just took snapshots to show to my family where I was working,” says Fieni, who mastered the art of photography on his own. His pictures have been published in National Geographic, The Guardian and The New York Times.

Now, a selection of these sumptuous images are on display. ‘Restoring the Murals of Mustang: A Journey through Body, Soul and Heart’ is a sacred visual journey in itself, celebrating Mustang’s fragile culture and ecology.

“The exhibition is not only about the restoration,” Fieni hastens to add. "It’s a retrospective of my 16 years in Mustang.”

And what a retrospective: the ground floor of the gallery is dedicated to the ‘soul’, the life and spirituality of the Mustang. Fieni has caught intimate moments of monks praying or preparing mandalas. About a striking picture of the interior of the Tupchen Monastery, the photographer says modestly: “When you have beautiful places and people, it is easy to take nice pictures.”

On the first floor, the ‘body’ gets all the attention it deserves. The high-angle shots give the sculpted, arid landscape of Mustang a life-like quality. The pilgrimage path of Damodar Kunda, the Kali Gandaki caves or a huge cumulus etched in an azure sky are hypnotic, almost mystic, images.

In the beginning, Fieni and Lunsford found it difficult to convince Mustang's monks to let them touch the ancient, holy murals. “But they gradually understood the importance of our work and joined us,” Fieni remembers.

During the restoration process, some locals wanted to depart from planned restoration. As Buddhists need images to pray, they wanted to repaint missing limbs of their deities to make them whole. Such type of intervention was unthinkable for the Italian restorers.”

“We first had this very Western notion of restoration, but we finally did what the local people wanted,” he adds. The two groups learnt to understand each other. What was supposed to be purely a restoration activity then became a social and development project.

“I am confident that the Lobas can do the restoration by themselves,” explains Fieni. Some 30 farmers from Mustang have trained to be artists, and five of them have even gone to China to train restorers there.

All these aspects of Fieni’s involvement in restoring Mustang's precious murals are depicted in photographs on the second floor of Siddhartha Art Gallery which is dedicated to the 'heart' -- the people and their centuries of tradition, faith and devotion.

This final stage of the exhibition has 34 smaller pictures of the different restoration steps, and seem to show the reasons why Fieni has left a part of himself in Mustang. “We are family now,” he says.

In the last 16 years, Fieni has worked with local artists to restore over 2,000 sq m of walls that had been damaged by water, wind and smoke. But now that local expertise has been built, Mustang will no longer have to depend on foreign restoration experts in future.

Says Fieni: “When we will have finished, I’ll be proud of us, and at the same time, sad to leave this place.”

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