Reggio Emilia, European Photography returns. The 2023 edition dedicated to Europe and its peoples

Fresh winner of the 2022 edition of the Lucie Awards in Los Angeles, the most coveted award in the industry, as the best Photo Festival of the Year, the Fotografia Europea festival, promoted and produced by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation together with the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and with the contribution of the Emilia-Romagna Region, returns to Reggio Emilia from April 28 to June 11, 2023.

Europe matters: visions of a restless identity is the theme of the 2023 edition, to which the projects selected by the festival’s artistic direction, composed of Tim Clark (editor 1000 Words & curator Photo London Discovery), Walter Guadagnini (historian of photography and Director of CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia), and Luce Lebart (historian of photography, 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). This edition number XVIII aims to tell the story of Europe, the peoples who inhabit it and all the nuances of the identity of this multiethnic community. And it does so through photography, capable of freezing the moment to help us understand and comprehend its directions and dynamics, but also through the meetings, lectures, book presentations and from the educational activities that will be organized during the festival.

The theme

Beginning with a reflection on the idea of Europe and the ideals that constitute it, the exhibitions highlight questions about the current condition of the multicultural and globalized world we live in, a world in which Europe no longer exercises, long ago, the spiritual and material hegemony that for centuries it was recognized as having. The artists thus trace, through the medium of photography, the dynamic and uncertain lines of an increasingly mobile and varied identity, with the aim of making sense of the ’restlessness that runs through it.

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, 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 constructed from the biographies of men and women of African descent living in Portugal, the ingrained prejudices in society. In the next room, Güle Güle (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 & 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 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 intention of prolonging the life of these images, usually linked to specific events and whose existence ends with their publication in the press. Alessia Rollo, an Italian photographer of Apulian origin, talks in her multimedia project Parallel Eyes about a journey to discover the ancient rituals of the South, restoring to the viewer the mystery of magic and ancestral forces that bind nature to man and his fellow human beings. In his photographs, Rollo reconstructs the cultural identity of southern Italy with analog and digital manipulation techniques that 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. Samuel Gratacap returns to Reggio Emilia with Bilateral, a never-before-seen work about the landscape as seen from both sides of the border and through the voices of the people who that border seeks to cross. The project also focuses 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 a visual ode to the city that has always fascinated her because of the freedom it enjoyed during the Soviet era. After visiting it for the first time in 2003, Yemchuk 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 who 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 earth’s spontaneous resources. 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. He does so by bringing into dialogue two recent series, 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.

This edition’s landmark exhibition will be hosted in the frescoed rooms on the ground floor of St. Peter’s Cloisters and will be dedicated to Sabine Weiss, one of the most important voices of French humanist photography along with Robert Doisneau. Disappeared in 2021 at the age of 97, Weiss practiced this profession throughout her life and embraced every field of photography, immortalizing emotions and feelings of her subjects, lingering on their gestures and the relationship she was able to establish with them each time and from which the true power of the image flowed. Through archival photos and numerous documents and magazines of the time, the exhibition Sabine Weiss. A Photographer’s Life curated by Virginie Chardin, traces Weiss’ 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 San Domenico Cloisters venue will display the exhibition dedicated to the commissioning that the festival entrusts to a different artist each year along with the two winning Open Call projects. The 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 as 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, a constellation of possibilities, inviting 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, with Protege Noctem - If Darkness disappeared documents another revolutionary battle in the ecological warfare taking place in this era, that of 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. Balsamini immortalizes 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, invites reflection on the global relationship between the individual, society and power. The research process, begun in 2018 and carried out in collaboration with journalist Christian Elia, offers an immersion into contemporary Albania and aims 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.

The da Mosto Palace venue is home to 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, a testament to that widespread 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 has 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 same venue, Ariane Loze, a Belgian artist, presents Utopia and Studies and Definitions, two of four videos made between April 2017 and October 2018 to reflect on Europe. In the former, 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, on the other hand, 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.

Embracing the festival are numerous other partner exhibitions gravitating around it, organized by the city’s most important cultural institutions and hosted in their spaces. At Palazzo dei Musei, the photography section continues its reflection on the role of the image as a tool capable of revealing the complexities of reality and the present time, with the exhibition Un piede nell’Eden. Luigi Ghirri and other gazes (April 28, 2023 - February 25, 2024, www.musei.re.it ), a rich and articulated itinerary dedicated to the natural element that, starting from Luigi Ghirri’s research in the 1970s and 1980s, invites us to reflect 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 offers a series of research 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) that testify to a feeling of belonging towards natural spaces and the need of their profound rethinking in the context of modern cities. The exhibition, curated by Ilaria Campioli, is promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia (Musei Civici, Panizzi Library) in collaboration with Archivio Eredi Luigi Ghirri. Also at 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 present a solo exhibition at Triennale Milano-from this year, one among 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 15 years later, can be a source of new considerations on our recent past and stimulate updated reflections in light of recent disruptive events. Also presented in the Panizzi Library is another exhibition related to Fotografia Europea, Alberto Franchetti e la fotografia, which displays part of the recent donation made by the Ponsi family on the heritage of photographs taken by Alberto Franchetti and highlights the musician and composer’s interest in the photographic media, understood as a language of modernity tout court. Interesting is his gaze, framing, and play of light that testify not only to his attention but also to his sensitivity to the world around him, made up of intimate moments and poignant landscapes.

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 offers 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. In this series of portraits, the coffee table takes on the significance of a stage on which each of the musicians has the opportunity to stage himself, in many cases with the same spirit of experimentation that characterizes him in music.

Demonstrating and reinforcing the cultural vibrancy that characterizes Reggio Emilia during the festival, other cultural institutions present related projects. Collezione Maramotti presents 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, No Home from War represents the most extensive exhibition on Prickett’s work to date. The photographer began his work in 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), Prickett 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 proposes 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 restores 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 indochal tale of the countries “beyond the curtain,” where 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, returns to 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 the ages of 18 and 25 toward a collective project and who in 10 meetings will lead them to reflect on a subject, observe it and study it through the camera. Originally from Reggio Emilia, Elena has already gained a prominent position in the contemporary art scene with her projects, poetically reinterpreting the cultural and natural heritage of places and interweaving stories, facts and fantasies transmitted by local communities.

In addition to the exhibitions enriches the Festival a calendar of events that will accompany visitors from the opening days - April 28, 29, 30 and May 1 - until June 11. Scheduled are 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 criticart critic and curator) and also meetings with artists, book presentations (including Dear Kairos by Simon Bray, the winner of the FE+SK Book Award, an award organized in collaboration with the independent publishing house Skinnerboox), book signings, portfolio readings and also [PARENTESI] BOOKFAIR, the space dedicated to independent publishers.

Fotografia Europea repeats the great success of its musical declination FOTOFONIA, curated by Max Casacci, producer and founder of Subsonica.

On stage again this year we will discover a bit of sound Italy capable of surprising and dialoguing with the world without inferiority complexes. It starts on Friday, April 28, in Piazza Prampolini with Whitemary, a young singer and author of a “dance” that is as intelligent as it is enthralling; always in the sphere of music that is danced to, the young Calabrian producer Indian Wells. On Saturday, April 29, again Piazza Prampolini, Spime.im, a Turin-based collective that makes the interaction between images and musical technologies its stylistic hallmark, and Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Alessandro Cortini with his own electronic project with great listening figures. Then, on Sunday 30, in a very special location such as the Church of San Francesco, Earthphonia Planet, an unprecedented and hyper-technological show of sound, images and nature storytelling with Max Casacci and Professor Stefano Mancuso, a renowned scholar of plant intelligence. The event is in collaboration with the Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla and Soli Deo Gloria. Organs, Sounds and Voices of the City. Illuminating the OFF Night on Saturday, May 6 in Casotti Square will be the delicate sonorizations 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 (contemporary art expert, face of Sky Arte and voice of Radio Rai) and Rodrigo D’Erasmo (multi-instrumentalist, composer and member of Afterhours) with the Lives project, which aspires to compile a series of “musical novels” of art and, in this case, photography with a special edition on Nan Goldin. It’s all live: fast-paced, straightforward accounts of the vicissitudes of the artists’ lives and works, with a soundtrack performed on the spot.

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, historic 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.

Reggio Emilia, European Photography returns. The 2023 edition dedicated to Europe and its peoples

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