Reggio Emilia, European Photography festival returns

It is inspired by Camus’ famous phrase An Invincible Summer the title of the 17th edition of the FOTOGRAFIA EUROPEA Festival, which returns to Reggio Emilia from April 29 to June 12, 2022. The ’event, promoted and produced by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation together with the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and with the contribution of the Emilia-Romagna Region, is itinerant among the Cloisters of San Pietro, Palazzo da Mosto, the Cloisters of San Domenico, Panizzi Library, Santa Maria Gallery, Spazio Gerra, the Civic Museums, Collezione Maramotti, Fondazione I Teatri and the spaces of the OFF Circuit, which host exhibitions by great masters and young debutants.

It was the Festival’s artistic direction, composed of Tim Clark and Walter Guadagnini, that selected the works of this year’s protagonists by combining international looks and different sensibilities. Underlying the Festival, as always, will be stories and narratives that are very often intimate, other times more open and unabashed but in both cases with the aim of stimulating new points of view and a reflection on the complexity of the world and the threads that weave its inhabitants in the four corners of the planet. Multiple looks at contemporaneity through the medium of photography, to question the role of images and visual culture in this particular historical moment.

The exhibitions

As always, the halls of the monumental Cloisters of St. Peter ’s will be the centerpiece of the festival, hosting ten exhibitions. On the second floor, in order of itinerary, we find Nicola Lo Calzo with the project entitled Binidittu, a reflection on the condition of migrant people in the Mediterranean through the figure of St. Benedict the Moor, the first black saint in modern history, considered an allegory of our times: a meeting place between the Mare Nostrum and the world, between memory and oblivion, between trivialized racism and shared humanitas. In the next room, Hoda Afshar, through the shots of the complex project Speak The Wind reveals the extraordinary landscapes of Iran, its people and their rituals, photographing the wind and the intertwined traditions and beliefs it carries, to form a visible record of the invisible through the eye of the imagination. American photographer Carmen Winant, on the other hand, in her Fire on World series of images weaves multiple narratives through hundreds of found slides of protest, birth, and small worlds, which line up neatly and put together form a larger picture of social unrest and dissent. The Japanese Seiichi Furuya with the exhibition First trip to Bologna 1978 /Last trip to Venice 1985 recounts the first and last trip he and his wife Christine Gössler made, through intimate portraits and still images, which allowed him to reconstruct the memory of those moments, up to Christine’s suicide. Ken Grant, a British photographer, offers the exhibition Benny Profane, a long-term project on a port district around Liverpool, which becomes in his shots an immersion in a space and those who depend on it, an account of kinship and defiance in a difficult land. Young Guanyu Xu’s Temporarily Censored Home photographs transform the conservative domestic space of his childhood into a scene of queer revelation, protest, and reclamation through a mosaic of images culled from Western fashion magazines and cinema, as well as portraits of himself with other men, to stage a deeply intimate and political performance. Photographer Chloé Jafé with I give you my life tells the often unknown story of the women of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia among the most legendary in the world, wives, daughters, mistresses, who orbit the criminal activities of male gangsters and have dedicated their existence to them. Jonas Bendiksen, on the other hand, spreads chaos in the photojournalism community with The Book of Veles, a project that amalgamates fake news generated in the small, unknown Macedonian town of Veles to demonstrate, through a mixture of classic reportage, 3D avatar models and artificial intelligence text generation systems, that visual misinformation confuses even trained media professionals. Finally, Frenchman Alexis Cordesse with Talashi, (a word meaning fragmentation, disappearance in the Arabic language) explains what the Syrian civil war is through personal photographs taken by those living in exile: an act of collective re-enactment between intimacy and History.

This edition’s landmark exhibition will be housed in the frescoed rooms on the ground floor of St. Peter’s Cloisters and will be dedicated to Mary Ellen Mark, a documentary photographer who, from 1964 until her death in 2015, produced intensely vivid and groundbreaking photo essays that explore the reality of people, especially women, in a variety of complex and often difficult, painful, and sometimes almost impossible situations. Mary Ellen Mark: The Lives of Women, curated by Anne Morin, embraces the humanity of these women and shares it with a wider audience, providing her subjects with a meaningful, often extremely powerful voice.

The Palazzo da Mosto venue will feature the exhibition dedicated to the Guest Country, Russia, curated by Dimitri Ozerkov, Director of the Department of Contemporary Art at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which presents Paths in Ice, a selection of artists Alexander Gronsky, Anaïs Chabeur, Olya Ivanova, Evgeny Khenkin, Anselm Kiefer, John Pepper and Dimitry Sirotrin whose projects are intimately linked to the theme of European Photography 2022.

On the ground floor, shots from the new Fotografia Europea production, entrusted to Jitka Hanzlovà, find their place. The aim of this project is to tell how the resilience forces of adolescents are today particularly stressed by the social implications that the health situation has been imposing on them for the past two years.

The projects of the winners of this edition’s Open Call will be on view in the new space of Fotografia Europea: the Galleria Santa Maria, in the heart of the historic center. Simona Ghizzoni tells in her project Isola how she managed to recover a relationship with nature and people, taking advantage of the Covid emergency to leave Rome and return to take refuge in the Emilian Apennines. Spain’s Gloria Oyarzabal, photographer and filmmaker, sets the focus of her investigation on the concept of the Museum in particular from a colonialist perspective with the project Usus fructus abusus. Finally, Maxime Richè, a Parisian, has long been measuring man’s ability to adapt to the consequences of environmental upheavals. In Paradise, the focus is the fire that incinerated the California town of the same name in just four hours and the people who, in spite of it, return to rebuild their lives, right where life was so brutally obliterated.

Embracing the festival are numerous other partner exhibitions gravitating around it, organized by the city’s most important cultural institutions and hosted at their spaces. On the 30th anniversary of Luigi Ghirri’s death, at Palazzo dei Musei, the exhibition In scala diversa. Luigi Ghirri, Italia in Miniatura and New Perspectives, curated by Ilaria Campioli, Joan Fontcuberta and Matteo Guidi, starting from the series In scala realized by Luigi Ghirri on several occasions, from the late 1970s to the first half of the 1980s, in the Italia in Miniatura amusement park in Rimini, explores the themes of the double, fiction and theidea of reality itself, creating a dialogue with the collection-drawings, postcards, documents and images-from the park’s archives accumulated since the mid-1960s as a result of the founder Ivo Rambaldi’s numerous trips throughout the peninsula, in order to collect as much visual documentation as possible for the construction of the models.

Also at the Palazzo dei Musei, “Encounters! Art and People,” a project of Reggio Emilia Cities without Barriers - STRADE dedicated to the encounter between fragility and creativity. Artist Alessandra Calò, who prefers the practice of off-camera work, and seven people with frailty create, drawing on the Museums’ rich collection, a veritable herbarium through the use of ancient contact photographic printing techniques. The exhibition Herbarium. Flowers Remained Pink, along with the printing experiments and workshop making, will be housed in a new museum space that opens to dialogue with the city.

The Cloisters of San Domenico will host the ninth edition of Young Italian Photography, a project of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia that enhances the talents of contemporary Italian photography under 35. The exhibition, significantly titled Possible, curated by Ilaria Campioli and Daniele De Luigi, presents the research of Marcello Coslovi, Chiara Ernandes, Claudia Fuggetti, Caterina Morigi, Giulia Parlato, Riccardo Svelto, and Giulia Vanelli, artists selected by an international jury, composed of the curators and Chiara Fabro - Festival Panoràmic in Barcelona, Shoair Mavlian - Photoworks in Brighton and Krzysztof Candrowicz - Fotofestiwal in Łódź.

New in this edition is the establishment of the Luigi Ghirri Prize, on the 30th anniversary of the author’s death, in collaboration with the Luigi Ghirri Heirs Archive. Spazio Gerra presents the project In Her Rooms by Maria Clara Macrì in which the author explores the relationship between empathy, intimacy and the contemporary representation of women. In her work, the photographer succeeds in capturing the complex and intense nature of today’s femininity, liberated from stereotypes and the sexualization and objectification of which she is a victim and visually expressing the essence of a new international and global feeling, also due to the strong transmigration to the feminine.

The Panizzi Library, with the exhibition Vasco Ascolini: an autobiography in pictures curated by Massimo Mussini, recounts the artistic and working life of the Reggio Emilia photographer through 40 years of shots in a courageous journey made up of important encounters and great determination. The intent is to acquaint the public with the photographer’s donation to the city by recreating a sort of travel diary in which Ascolini points out the passing moments with which he progressively enriched his expressive language. The Collezione Maramotti dedicates its exhibition to photographer Carlo Valsecchi, who in the forty-four large-format photographs that make up Bellum, all of which are featured in the volume accompanying the exhibition, and of which about twenty are on display, recounts the ancestral conflict between man and nature and between man and man.

Fondazione I Teatri is exhibiting Arianna Arcara ’s shots in which Theater and Photography again enter into relationship in the new project entitled The Visit/Triptych that Fondazione I Teatri, with Reggio Parma Festival and in collaboration with Collezione Maramotti and Max Mara have entrusted to the artist, inviting her to an interpretation of the work of the Belgian dance-theater company Peeping Tom at the Aperto 2021 Festival.

Also for this edition, the CIRCUIT OFF, the collective and independent event that enriches the Festival with an innumerable series of exhibitions spread throughout the city, presents projects by professional photographers alongside young first-time photographers, 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 7 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 2023.

Also in the 2022 edition of the Festival is the Speciale Diciottoventicinque, the training project of Fotografia Europea, now in its 11th edition, created to accompany young photography lovers on a path from conception to realization of an exhibition project, entrusted this year tothis year to Anush Hamzehian and Vittorio Mortarotti, two exceptional artists who have been working together for years combining video and photography and who, strengthened by their experience, will focus on multidisciplinarity, aware that a visual project can be built and enriched through different languages.

Absolute novelty of this edition is FOTOFONIA EUROPEA: a musical project in two evenings curated by Max Casacci, producer and founder of Subsonica, in which the mixture of images and electronic music builds a musical declination of Fotografia Europea.

In addition to the exhibitions enriches the Festival a calendar of events designed not only for the three inaugural days-April 29, 30 and May 1-but that will accompany visitors and fans also in the following weeks until June 12: lectures, meetings with artists, book presentations (including the winner of the FE+SK Book Award, a prize organized in collaboration with the independent publishing house Skinnerboox ), book signings, portfolio readings, workshops, a bookfair dedicated to independent publishers, and shows designed to nurture a cultural confrontation that, starting from photography, also addresses cross-cutting themes.

Special Sponsor for the 2022 edition is confirmed as Iren.

Reggio Emilia, European Photography festival returns

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