Reggio Emilia, European Photography 2023 exhibitions: from Sabine Weiss to Luigi Ghirri

Reggio Emilia is increasingly a City of Photography thanks to Fotografia Europea, the international cultural festival dedicated to contemporary photography that was born in 2006 and is produced and promoted by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia with the contribution of the Emilia-Romagna Region to reflect through the medium of photography on the complexities of contemporaneity following the lesson of Reggio Emilia photographer Luigi Ghirri, whose archive is preserved in the city. This year Fotografia Europea reaches its 18th edition and as always will involve different places in Reggio Emillia with exhibitions revolving around a specific theme.

Winner of the 2022 edition of the Lucie Awards in Los Angeles, the most coveted prize in the field, as the best Photo Festival of the Year, the festival will take place from April 28 to June 11, 2023, and will have as its theme a highly topical subject: Europe matters: visions of a restless identity. Beginning with a reflection on the idea of Europe and the ideals that constitute it, the exhibitions will highlight questions about the current condition of the multicultural and globalized world we live in, a world in which Europe has long since ceased to exercise the spiritual and material hegemony that for centuries it was acknowledged to have. The artists will therefore trace, through the medium of photography, the dynamic and uncertain lines of an increasingly mobile and varied identity, with the intention of making sense of the restlessness that runs through it.

The projects selected by the Festival’s artistic direction, composed of Tim Clark (editor 1000 Words & 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 precisely to this theme. It will be an edition characterized not only by the quality of the exhibitions but also by the level of the meetings, lectures, book presentations and educational activities that will be organized during the festival.

As always, the fulcrum of Fotografia Europea will be the rooms of the Chiostri di San Pietro, which will host ten exhibitions.

On the second floor, Mónica De Miranda questions standard notions of identity based on the categories of race and gender with her project The Island, which reveals, through a counter-narrative built from the biographies of men and women of African descent living in Portugal, the ingrained prejudices in society.

In the next room, Güle Güle (which means goodbye in Turkish) is a personal representation of Istanbul and the profound changes that are affecting Turkish society through the eyes of Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni. Documenting marginalized communities, these shots reveal the human substrate that, according to the two photographers, represents the most sincere expression of any place, beyond the commonly accepted superficial social “facade.”

Next, Simon Roberts’ project, Merrie Albion, photographs the United Kingdom, offering the audience indispensable 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, of all those mass initiatives that oppose political decisions, violations of democratic norms and human rights. It is a collection of shots that constitutes a warning against growing populism and 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.

In her multimedia project Parallel Eyes, Alessia Rollo 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 fellow man. In her shots, the photographer reconstructs the cultural identity of southern Italy with analog and digital manipulation techniques, which introduce into a re-enchanted, evocative and spiritual universe, drawing on a ritual heritage that is still living and simultaneously disengaging it from those cultural stereotypes created decades ago by neo-realism.

Instead,Samuel Gratacap returns to Reggio Emilia with Bilateral, an unprecedented work on the landscape 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 by mobilizing in the places where they live and, in parallel, on the decision makers, those responsible for those dispositions that everyone will suffer, invisible, interchangeable, faceless but masters of their image.

Ukrainian Yelena Yemchuk ’s photographic project Odesa is meant 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: 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. The resulting photographic project, 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 work entitled 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. She then places two recent series in dialogue, It is a Blessing to be the Color of Earth (2020), which depicts 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.

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It is in the frescoed rooms on the ground floor of the Cloisters of St. Peter ’s that the historic exhibition of this edition of the festival will be on view: it will be dedicated to Sabine Weiss, among the most important exponents of French humanist photography along with Robert Doisneau. Disappeared in 2021 at the age of 97, Weiss practiced this profession throughout her life, embracing every field of photography, capturing emotions and feelings of her subjects, lingering on their gestures and the relationship she managed to establish with them each time. 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 Weiss’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 Cloisters of San Domenico will host the exhibition dedicated to the commissioning that the festival entrusts to a different artist each year along with the two winning Open Call projects. This year’s commissioning has been entrusted to 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. The images of In the clear days you see Europe are the restitution of a path: possibilities that invite the construction of a new critical perspective toward cultural contamination, emphasizing the dialogue woven by these young women who from the shore, in the clear days, look at their Europe.

Mattia Balsamini, one of the two winners of the European Photography Open Call, documents with Protege Noctem - If Darkness disappeared another revolutionary battle in the ecological warfare taking place in this era: the defense of darkness. To tell the tale, he brings to his images the alliance that scientists and citizens have formed to mobilize against the disappearance of the night and its creatures. The photographer captures the night sky that has become a tarnished mosaic, demonstrating how both the natural world and the human circadian cycle are greatly damaged by the obstruction of nighttime darkness caused by the spectrum released by billions of artificial lights that dazzle the ecosystem.

Camilla de Maffei, also an Open Call winner, presents Grande Padre, 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. The research process, initiated in 2018 and carried out in collaboration with journalist Christian Elia, proposes an immersion in contemporary Albania in order 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,Palazzo da Mosto will host 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 created by 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 is presenting part of its important photographic collection at Fotografia Europea 2023 as a testament to the extensive international network of friends, partners and supporters who believe in the importance and moral, aesthetic and developmental values of contemporary art. 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.

On the ground floor of the Palace, 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. In the first, the artist, dressed in a yellow raincoat in a blue theater, shapes a four-way dialogue on foundational themes such as being a community, feeling represented, the search for the common good, and, finally, imagining a utopia. In Studies and Definitions we witness a debate that stems from reading the first page of the consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union, all conceived by Ariane Loze to confront existing texts.

Numerous other partner exhibitions will gravitate around the festival, 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 A Foot in 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 and articulated 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, in the Palazzo dei Musei comes Giovane Fotografia Italiana #10 | Premio Luigi Ghirri 2023, the project of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia that enhances 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. In addition to competing for the Luigi Ghirri Prize, which will offer the winning project the opportunity to have a solo exhibition at Triennale Milano, starting this year one of the seven artists will participate in an artist residency in Stockholm, culminating in an exhibition curated by the Italian Cultural Institute.

The Panizzi Library photo library will participate in the 2023 edition 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. This small “anthology” of the 2007 edition, reproposing the European question more than fifteen years later, may be a source of new considerations on our recent past and may stimulate updated reflections in light of recent events.
The Panizzi Library also presents another exhibition related to Fotografia Europea: Alberto Franchetti and Photography, which displays part of the recent donation made by the Ponsi family on the heritage 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 feature 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.

Throughout the festival, other cultural institutions will also present related projects.

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. The photographer began his coverage of Europe and the Middle East with an urgency to restore and expose the effects of wars on the civilian population, on the lives of devastated and uprooted people, regardless of whether they belong to one side or the other. Starting from an intimate and domestic dimension of the social and humanitarian consequences of conflicts in the long run (Croatia, Abkhazia), the photographer moved to the places of forced migration, to the lands of sought-after refuge (Middle East and Europe), to the front lines in combat zones (Iraq, Ukraine).

CSAC - Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione of the University of Parma will offer the exhibition Antonio Sansone: Rituals of Europe. Photojournalist Antonio Sansone (Naples, 1929 - Farfa Sabina, 2008) was one of the most significant exponents of civil commitment photojournalism after World War II. His is a militant vision, organic to the historical left and the New Left, as opposed to the officialdom of the big agencies, pro-government press organs. Through his shots he renders an often unexpected portrait of Europe’s second twentieth century, where the rigor of the anthropologist is matched by the sensitivity and empathy of a storyteller. The vivid investigations of Naples, the faces and rituals of Italian politics often captured with salacious accents, but also the indocile account of the countries “beyond the curtain,” where to the rituals of officialdom, which we discover are not so different from those of the other West, Samson juxtaposes investigations of the everyday, of the ferments that ran through Europe, from Ireland to France, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

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 between 18 and 25 years old 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 be enriched by a calendar of events, from the opening days (April 28, 29, 30 and May 1) until June 11.

Scheduled conferences with Rosella Postorino and Paolo Rumiz curated by Loredana Lipperini (curator, writer and radio host), those with Emilio Isgrò and Elena Loewenthal curated by Luca Beatrice (art critic and curator), meetings with artists, book presentations (including Dear Kairos by Simon Bray, winner of the FE+SK Book Award, an award organized in collaboration with the independent publishing house Skinnerboox), book signings, portfolio readings and [PARENTESI] BOOKFAIR, the space dedicated to independent publishers.

Fotografia Europea also reproposes the great success of its musical declination FOTOFONIA, curated by Max Casacci, producer and founder of Subsonica. It will start on Friday, April 28 in Piazza Prampolini with Whitemary and Indian Wells. Saturday, April 29, also in Piazza Prampolini, the Spime.im collective and Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Alessandro Cortini. On Sunday, April 30, in the Church of St. Francis, Earthphonia Planet, an unprecedented, hyper-technological show of sound, images and nature storytelling with Max Casacci and Professor Stefano Mancuso, renowned scholar of plant intelligence.

Illuminating the OFF Night on Saturday, May 6 in Casotti Square, will be soundtracks by d.j. designer Luce Clandestina.

Thanks to the collaboration with TIWI, on Friday, May 28, from midnight, at Polveriera, the appointment with photography will be with Nicolas Ballario and Rodrigo D’Erasmo with the Lives project, which aspires to draw up a series of “musical novels” of art and, in this case, photography with a special edition on Nan Goldin.

Also for this edition, the CIRCUIT OFF, a collective and independent event that enriches the festival with a series of exhibitions spread throughout the city, will present projects by professional photographers alongside young people with first experiences, enthusiasts and associations who will have to measure themselves against this year’s theme by exhibiting their shots in stores, restaurants, studios, courtyards and private homes, historical venues, and art galleries. Also part of this circuit is the OFF@school project involving schools throughout the province of Reggio Emilia. May 6 is the evening dedicated to the Off Circuit and at this event the winner of the Max Spreafico prize will be decreed, who will be given the opportunity to produce a new exhibition and exhibit it during the next edition of Fotografia Europea, in 2024.

Special Sponsor for the 2023 edition is confirmed as Iren.

For info: https://www.fotografiaeuropea.it/

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Reggio Emilia, European Photography 2023 exhibitions: from Sabine Weiss to Luigi Ghirri

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