European Photography 2023 reflects on Europe's restless identity

From April 28 to June 11, 2023, Fotografia Europea, the international cultural festival dedicated to contemporary photography produced and promoted by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia with the contribution of the Emilia-Romagna Region, returns to Reggio Emilia to reflect through the medium of photography on the complexities of contemporaneity. The theme of this 18th edition will be Europe matters: visions of a restless identity. Starting from a reflection on theidea of Europe and the ideals that constitute it, the exhibitions, which as always will involve different venues in Reggio Emilia, City of Photography, will focus on the current condition of the multicultural and globalized world in which we live, where Europe no longer exercises, for some time now, thatspiritual and material hegemony that for centuries it was recognized as having. Through the medium of photography, the artists will therefore trace the dynamic and uncertain lines of anincreasingly mobile and varied identity, with the intention of making sense of the restlessness that runs through it.

The projects chosen by the festival’s artistic direction, composed of Tim Clark (editor 1000 Words and curator Photo London Discovery), Walter Guadagnini (photography historian and Director of CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia), and Luce Lebart (photography historian, co-author of the seminal volume Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes, curator of exhibitions and researcher both for the Archive of Modern Conflict Collection and independently) will refer to this very theme.

The halls of St. Peter’s Cloisters will host no less than ten exhibitions. The landmark exhibition of this edition of Fotografia Europea, hosted precisely in the frescoed rooms on the ground floor, will be dedicated to Sabine Weiss, among the most important exponents of French humanist photography. Through archival photos and numerous documents and magazines of the time, the exhibition Sabine Weiss. A Photographer’s Life, curated by Virginie Chardin, will trace the photographer’s entire career, from her beginnings in 1935 to the 1980s. The exhibition is produced by Atelier Sabine Weiss Studio and Photo Elysée with the support of Jeu de Paume and Les Rencontres d’Arles and under the patronage of the Swiss Confederation.

The Chiostri di San Pietro will then host the exhibitions of Monica De Miranda questions standard notions of identity based on the categories of race and gender with the project The Island; Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni with Gule Gule (which means goodbye in Turkish), a personal representation of Istanbul and the profound changes that are affecting Turkish society Turkey; Simon Roberts who in Merrie Albion photographs the United Kingdom, offering insights into notions of identity and belonging and what it means to be British at this crucial moment in contemporary history. Also on view is The Brexit Lexicon, a two-part video work that reports on the most common terms that have characterized discussions about Brexit in politics and the media.

The Archive of Public Protests with You will never walk alone, on the other hand, collects the visual traces of social activism: a collection of shots that constitutes a warning against growing populism and against discrimination, with the aim of prolonging the life of these images, usually linked to specific events and whose existence ends with their publication in the press.

Alessia Rollo in her multimedia project Parallel Eyes talks about a journey to discover the ancient rituals of the South, restoring the mystery of magic and ancestral forces that bind nature to man and his fellows. Samuel Gratacap, on the other hand, presents Bilateral, an unprecedented work on the landscape as seen from both sides of the border and through the voices of the people trying to cross that border. The project also intends to focus on those struggling to make the world less violent. In contrast, Ukrainian Yelena Yemchuk ’s Odesa project aims to be a visual ode to the city that has always fascinated her because of the freedom she enjoyed during the Soviet era. After visiting it for the first time in 2003, she returned to Odesa in 2015 to document the faces of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys and girls from the military academy: the conflict on the eastern border that had begun a year earlier convinced her to expand the project by also capturing the life context of those faces that would soon find themselves at the front.

An anthropological exploration prompted Frenchman Geoffroy Mathieu to follow the gatherers, the people who, on the edges of cultivated areas or in uncultivated spaces, live off the products that nature spontaneously continues to offer albeit in damaged and precarious landscapes. L’Or des ruines thus tells of an alternative livelihood that sees in the search for fruits and medicinal plants a new way of living in a communal world and discovers a possible economy built on sharing the spontaneous resources of the earth.

Cédrine Scheidig explores in De la mer à la terre the personal narratives of young people, in France and Martinique, in the process of self-discovery, while opening up spaces for reflection on political issues such as the colonial past, cultural hybridization, modern masculinities, and migration. He then places two recent series in dialogue, It is a Blessing to be the Color of Earth (2020), which portrays the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the Parisian suburbs, and Les mornes, le feu, begun in 2022 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in which the artist reveals the connections between two territories and the imaginaries of their inhabitants.

The Cloisters of San Domenico will host an exhibition by Myriam Meloni, an Italian photographer who lives and works between Barcelona and Tangier, who, starting from the myth of Europa narrated by Ovid, builds a portrait of contemporary “Europeans”: young women, autonomous, professional women, the happiest outcome of the 20th century and the Erasmus project, who are carrying out a gentle revolution, taking root in the communities that welcome them but continuing to embody the values from which they come.

Mattia Balsamini, one of the two winners of the European Photography Open Call, documents the defense of darkness with Protege Noctem - If Darkness disappeared. The photographer captures the night sky that has become a tarnished mosaic, demonstrating how both the natural world and the human circadian cycle are severely damaged by the obstruction of nighttime darkness caused by the spectrum released by billions of artificial lights that dazzle the ecosystem.

Instead,Camilla de Maffei, winner of the Open Call, presents Great Father, a long-term project that, starting from the particular case of Albania, aims to invite reflection on the global relationship between the individual, society and power. An immersion in contemporary Albania to explore the implications and consequences of the rise and fall of a regime, highlighting the scars that this transitional process has imprinted on society, while also documenting the strange sense of emptiness that freedom, regained after forty-five years of a totalitarian and capillary regime (the reference is to Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship, one of the fiercest of the contemporary age), brings with it.

Instead, the da Mosto Palace will display photographic works from the Ars Aevi collection celebrating Bosnia and Herzegovina as the Guest Country of this edition of the festival. A partial anagram of the word “Sarajevo,” Ars Aevi (“art of the time” in Latin) is a unique contemporary art museum project born out of the collective will and ethical cooperation of leading international artists, curators and contemporary art museums who donated their works to Sarajevo during the war to support the city gripped by siege and accompany its civil, ethical and cultural rebirth. Ars Aevi presents part of its photographic collection on this occasion to testify to the extensive international network of friends, partners and supporters who believe in the importance and moral, aesthetic and developmental values that contemporary art carries. The exhibition, which enjoys the patronage of the Embassy of Italy in Sarajevo, is the result of the important collaboration developed in recent years between the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and the Municipality of Centar Sarajevo, culminating in the signing of a twinning pact between the two cities on May 9, 2022 in Reggio Emilia, the day on which Europe Day is celebrated, and on July 12, 2022 in Centar Sarajevo.

Also at Palazzo da Mosto, Belgian artist Ariane Loze presents Utopia and Studies and Definitions, two of four videos made between April 2017 and October 2018 to reflect on Europe.

Around the festival will revolve numerous other partner exhibitions organized by the city’s most important cultural institutions and hosted right in their spaces.

From April 28, 2023 to February 25, 2024, the Palazzo dei Musei will host the exhibition Un piede nell’Eden. Luigi Ghirri and other gazes, curated by Ilaria Campioli and promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia (Civic Museums, Panizzi Library) in collaboration with Archivio Eredi Luigi Ghirri. A rich itinerary dedicated to the natural element that, starting from Ghirri’s research in the 1970s and 1980s, invites reflection on the natural element and the need for its relocation within our perceptual Horizon. The reflection then expands to Gardens in Europe, a revisitation of the 1988 exhibition curated by Luigi Ghirri and Giulio Bizzarri, which proposes a series of researches on green areas and gardens conducted, in addition to Ghirri himself, by thirteen photographers (Andrea Abati, Olivo Barbieri, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Joan Fontcuberta, Mimmo Jodice, Gianni Leone, Francesco Radino, Olivier Richon, George Tatge, Ernesto Tuliozi, Fulvio Ventura, Varena Von Gagern, and Cuchi White), intending to testify to a feeling of belonging towards natural spaces and the need of their profound rethinking in the context of modern cities.

And again, the Palazzo dei Musei will also host Giovane Fotografia Italiana 10 | Premio Luigi Ghirri 2023, a project of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia that intends to enhance the talents of Italian photography under 35. Curated by Ilaria Campioli and Daniele De Luigi, the group exhibition of the seven artists Eleonora Agostini, Andrea Camiolo, Sofiya Chotyrbok, Davide Degano, Carlo Lombardi, Giulia Mangione, and Eleonora Paciullo, selected by an international jury, will revolve around the theme Belonging.

The Panizzi Library photo library will participate in Fotografia Europea with Flashback: a selection of photographic works from those exhibited during the 2007 Fotografia Europea festival, an edition that also focused on the theme of Europe in relation to its cities. The Panizzi Library will also present the exhibition Alberto Franchetti and Photography, which displays part of the recent donation made by the Ponsi family on the collection of photographs taken by Alberto Franchetti, highlighting the musician and composer’s interest in the photographic media, understood as a language of modernity tout court.

One year after Roberto Masotti’s death and on the occasion of the reissue of the volume You Tourned the Tables On Me, Spazio Gerra will offer 115 portraits of the world’s best-known contemporary musicians, including John Cage, Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, Demetrio Stratos and many others.

The Collezione Maramotti will host No Home from War: Tales of Survival and Loss, the first exhibition in Italy by British photojournalist Ivor Prickett. With more than fifty photographs taken in conflict scenarios from 2006 to 2022, it represents the most extensive exhibition on Prickett’s work to date.

CSAC - Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione of the University of Parma will propose the exhibition Antonio Sansone : Rituals of Europe, dedicated to Antonio Sansone (Naples, 1929 - Farfa Sabina, 2008), one of the most significant exponents of civil commitment photojournalism after World War II.

Once again this year, Speciale Diciottoventicinque, the educational project of Fotografia Europea, will accompany young photography lovers on a path from conception to realization of an exhibition project. Elena Mazzi will be the artist who this year will accompany participants aged between 18 and 25 toward a collective project, and in ten meetings will lead them to reflect on a subject, to observe and study it through the camera.

In addition to the exhibitions, the festival will offer a rich calendar of events throughout its duration.

Special Sponsor for the 2023 edition is confirmed Iren.

For all info you can visit https://www.fotografiaeuropea.it/

Image: Myriam Meloni, Claudia. From the series: On clear days you see Europe, Tanger 2023. Credit Myriam Meloni

European Photography 2023 reflects on Europe's restless identity

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