FOTOGRAFIA EUROPEA 2018 – 13th edition. REVOLUTIONS. Upheavals, Changes, Utopias

From April 20^th until June 17^th, the town of #reggioemilia is hosting the 13th edition of the EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHY festival, promoted by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation in collaboration with the Municipality of #reggioemilia and the Emilia-Romagna region. The #event solely focuses on the art form that best communicates and interprets the complexity of contemporary society. 

The2018edition of #fotografia EUROPEA, is once again the result of the collaboration withthe Emilia Romagna Region, as well as with a growing synergic national network with important regional cultural and artistic partners, such as the Mast Foundation (Bologna), the Csac of the University of Parma, the Collezione Maramotti, the Modena Arti Visive foundation, but also new partners Osservatorio Fotografico (Ravenna) and Linea di Confine per la #fotografia Contemporanea (Rubiera). For the second consecutive year, moreover, #fotografia Europea will also host the Stati Generali della #fotografia, a general assembly about photography promoted by the Department for Culture and Tourism. 

A network called SISTEMA FESTIVAL #fotografia has also been established, bringing together  #fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia), FotoLux (Lucca), Cortona On the Move-Festival internazionale di #fotografia, Festival Festival della #fotografia etica (Lodi) and Sifest-Savignano Immagini Festival. This will allow for the development of common initiatives, photographic commissions and much more, in collaboration with the Department for Culture and Tourism. The first results are already in: during #fotografia Europea it will be possible to buy a single ticket for the whole Festival system, and Munich will host an exhibition by photographer Tommaso Bonaventura dedicated to the theme BEHIND EXCELLENCE, curated by Walter Guadagnini, Art Director of #fotografia Europea, and produced by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation together with Cortona On the Move and Air Dolomiti.

Several exhibitions, lectures, performances and educational events will take place in the main cultural institutions and exhibition spaces of the town, hosting personalities coming from the worlds of photography, culture and knowledge. 

The #fotografia EUROPEA program has never been so rich, and it will expand into new venues that are rarely opened to the public as exhibit spaces, such as the imposing Banca d’Italia, the Baptistery and the Palazzo del Vescovado, the liberty-style Villa Zironi and the commercial building in via San Rocco. This will allow for a rediscovery of spaces that are usually unavailable to the public, promoting the appreciation for their value as historical and architectural heritage of the town.

Under Walter Guadagnini’s curatorial work, #fotografia Europea 2018 develops around the concept of  “REVOLUTIONS – Upheavals, Changes, Utopias”.

“How can photography represent the revolution today” wonders Walter Guadagnini, the Festival Arts Director, “besides and beyond the most immediate journalistic practices? More importantly, what is the meaning of the word revolution in today’s world, in our complex world, increasingly marked by social tension and mass migration, factors that undermine the stability of entire geographic and cultural areas? Who is a revolutionary today? It is difficult to imagine Che Guevara's epic deeds played out in our current world, where the revolutionary myth has become a ready-to-wear functional icon: perhaps this is yet another case in which we need to rethink not only in terms of images, but rather in terms of contemporary collective imagination”.

As Walter Guadagnini puts it, “the new edition of the #fotografia Europea is dedicated to all these possible interpretations and suggestions. The festival will therefore act within the realm of the "revolution of gaze and vision" that originated at the very birth of photography (which was greeted as "a new art in the midst of an old civilization", a perfect revolutionary condition), a realm that still marks today’s photography in the middle of the current digital revolution. And yet we wonder: is the digital revolution an actual revolution, or is it merely an evolution?”

THE EXHIBITIONS

Ideally, the tour of the 2018 European Photography festival starts at PALAZZO MAGNANI, which hosts the exhibition SEX & REVOLUTION! Immaginario, utopia, liberazione (1960-1977) by curator Pier Giorgio Carizzoni, under Pietro Adamo’s scientific direction (the latter being a Professor of Sociogy at the University of Turin). This will be an investigation around the genesis and the transformations of how sexual freedom was lived and perceived in the 60s and 70s, through over 300 vintage items: film sequences, author’s photographs, comics, tabloids, books, film posters, multimedial installations, mock-ups with design objects, music and much more. This is a journey that presents multifaceted materials and some shots by important photographers such as Angelo Frontoni and Paola Mattioli, a punctual socio-cultural analysis of a disruptive and revolutionary history in five section: Sexology and Philosophy; Publishing Houses and Culture In the 50s and 60s; The Underground Movement; Pornography; and Sexual Revolution: Victory or Defeat?

PALAZZO DA MOSTO hosts a multiple offer, with three exhibition projects.

The first is a tribute to Joel Meyerowitz, the great master of contemporary photography, who has a special connection with our country, so much so that he lives here most of the year. The exhibition, entitled Transitions, 1962-1981, by curator Francesco Zanot, presents over 120 works tracing  the main stages of his work and life, in those decisive twenty years of his career. The exhibition aims to highlight and explore his revolutionary role in the photographic field: Meyerowitz was among the first American photographers to turn color into an essential element of his artistic language of the sixties and seventies, and he is also one of the leading figures in street photography.

The second project Rivoluzioni, Ribellioni, Cambiamenti, Utopie. 101 photobook dalla collezione della Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma (“Revolutions, Rebellions, Changes, Utopias. 101 photobooks from the collection of the National Gallery of Modern and #contemporaryart in Rome”), curated by Piero Cavagna and Laura Gasparini, re-reads some of the crucial moments in the history of the twentieth century through a series of photo books among the most important ever made, belonging to the collection of National Gallery of Modern and #contemporaryart of Rome. Some of the most significant photobooks revolving around the themes of revolution, protest and social and religious utopias that characterized the last century will be on display, such as some extraordinary volumes produced by totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, such as Communism, Fascism and Nazism.

The last proposal in Palazzo da Mosto is In/Finito. Un progetto di danza e #fotografia per spazi urbani, naturali o storici (“In/Finite. A project of dance and photography for urban, natural and historical spaces”), promoted in collaboration with Fondazione Nazionale della Danza and Compagnia Aterballetto, which will present some never-before-seen shots by the great fashion photographer Toni Thorimbert. The project revolves around the idea of comparing the ephemeral dimension of body performance with its photographic representation, which fixes forever a single moment. These are different ways of perceiving the body, setting the dialogue not only with space and time, but also with the eye of the spectator.

IRAN, guest country at #fotografia Europea 2018. 

The CHIOSTRI DI SAN DOMENICO venue hosts the exhibition Genesis of a Latent Vision: a Window onto #contemporaryart Photography in Iran, by curator Reza Sheikh and Mehrdad Nadjmabadi, coordinator Germana Rivi. Here are presented shots by 9 Iranian authors, including Ahmad Aali, Shadi Ghadirian, Gohar Dashti, a testimony to the evolution of Iranian photography, from social documentation to conceptual approach. The tribute to the Middle Eastern country continues with a series of photographs by Walter Niedermayr (b. in Bolzano, 1952) shot in Iran between 2005 and 2008, investigating a territory with a thousand-year history in which traces of ancient Persia,  industrialization, Western influence and the Islamic revolution coexist.

The BANCA D'ITALIA building will be the background for exhibitions that characterize, like every year, the Reggio-Emilia Festival: unpublished projects, conceived and commissioned specifically for the Festival, related to the theme "Revolutions", around which all contents revolve. The art director Walter Guadagnini has involved two important artists: Mishka Henner and Francesco Jodice.

Mishka Henner, the Belgian - English photographer who received the 2013 ICP Infinity Award for Art in New York, has created a project / installation of great visual and emotional impact: the visitor will dive into an unexpected dimension, among waves of the seas and oceans, without fully understanding what he is experiencing. The exhibition turns into a window onto the world, in constant "alert" mode, as the seas are scanned to capture signals of imminent danger.

Francesco Jodice, on the other hand, takes on an innovative path. Starting from this edition, one of the traditional commissioners will act in a new way, able to keep alive the attention on the Festival  beyond its opening days. Starting from the concept of “revolutions”, Jodice was asked to develop a project that would play out over the course of a whole year, presenting his work in progress step by step, through workshops and meetings, thus involving the town and the photography lovers. The end result will be exhibited in the next edition of #fotografia Europea and, just like Henner’s, it is to become part of the photographic heritage of the town, as part of the photocollection of the Panizzi Library of #reggioemilia.

The SPAZIO SAN ROCCO hosts Clément Cogitore’s Braguino o la comunità impossibile (“Braguino or the impossible community”), an artistic project that combines cinema, photography and video art, curated by Diane Dufour and Léa Bismuth. The French artist went to Braguino in 2016, a place named after a family living in wooden huts dispersed in the deep Siberian taiga, 700 km away from any human presence. Cogitore wanted to uncover the mystery of the choice of a man, Sasha Bragin, who decided to move to that place with his family for more than thirty years, hoping for a life of peace, in the most complete autarchy, and to create a model of self-sufficient life. Very quickly, however, this paradise became the background for an open conflict between two families - one  arrived later on - unable to live together

The SYNAGOGUE - an exhibition venue of great charm and historical value - hosts Iconic China, the most recent work by Luca Campigotto: a tale of his long journey in China that begins with the search for a mythical past and reaches the chaotic present of the megalopolis. His photographs reflect the soul of a country where cities with extraordinary futuristic horizons, projected into the future, blend with traditions and atmospheres that go back thousands of years.

The exhibition hosted in the liberty-style VILLA ZIRONI, is an hommage to Lorenzo Tricoli, the Milan-born artist who recently passed away, with The Archive you Deserve, his most complex work. It is an archive of newspaper clippings, books, photographic prints and magazines, collected over a period of several years, with images from the web occasionally added. The process consisted of collecting, cataloging, inventorying images and clippings, to be then archived. The Archive you Deserve represents a delirious and changeable version, based on real documents, of  recent Italian history. The exhibition is curated by Federica Chiocchetti - The Photocaptionist.

Elio Ciol, one of the great masters of Italian photography, is on show in the BATTISTERO and in the PALAZZO DEL VESCOVADO, with the exhibition Il soffio della storia (“the spirit of history”). For the first time the Catholic Diocese of #reggioemilia and Guastalla is involved in the Festival program with a photographic proposal of great quality, in suggestive buildings that become temporarily exhibition venues. The Friuli-based artist presents some of his most famous series, including those about the ruins of Libyan and Syrian archaeological cities such as Palmira and Lapis Magna, his highly poetic and evocative landscapes and, finally, an extraordinary exhibit on Pier Paolo Pasolini .

It is an all-Italian story that of the Fotoromanzo, around which revolves the exhibition at SPAZIO GERRA curated by ICS - Innovation Culture Society. It will cover more than thirty years of this mass cultural phenomenon, one of the many small silent "revolutions" that was underestimated by the intellectual world for its triviality and apparent sentimental ingenuity. In addition to photographs and materials from various public and private archives, cineromanzi and materials from the Zavattini Collection of the Panizzi Library in #reggioemilia are on display. It is indeed starting from a subject by Cesare Zavattini (among the few authors to understand the potential of this genre, a mixture of photography, cinema and comics), that a new contemporary fotoromanzo will be produced, set in present day and designed with social networks in mind. As a matter of fact the final product will be released for a month on a daily basis on Instagram, starting on the opening day of the exhibition, like a modern feuilleton novel.

The new venue Spazio U30CINQUE (at Piazza Scapinelli) hosts three exhibitions by upcoming photographers, curated by Daniele De Luigi and promoted by the Municipality of #reggioemilia in support of youth creativity, in collaboration with GAI - Associazione per il circuito dei Giovani Artisti Italiani, Paris-based Circulation(s), Festival de la Jeune Photographie Européenne and Brighton-based Photobiennal and with BJCEM - Biennale dei Giovani Artisti dell’Europa e del Mediterraneo, financed by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage, Presidency of the Council of Ministers - Department of Youth and National Civil Service and by ANCI. Activism was the open call by Giovane #fotografia Italiana, now in its sixth edition, presenting the projects of seven artists, selected among 136 candidates by an international jury composed by Carine Dolek, Shoair Mavlian and Daniele De Luigi. These young artists have been on a quest for uses of the photographic image as a form of activism, creating alternative visions and stimulating our critical, public and political consciousness. The exhibition was made possible with the contribution of Reire Srl. Saggio sulla cecità(“Essay on blindness”) is a three-way reflection by Federica Landi, Emeric Lhuisset and Ana Catarina Pinho, on the migration phenomenon, produced for the 16th Biennial of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. Energia Potenziale (“Potential Energy”) is the result of Calori & Maillard’s artistic residence in #reggioemilia. The duo explored the abandoned Officine Reggiane factories and the Calatrava bridges where, through performance, sculpture and photography, they created an ironic allegory about the forces of political and economic powers going through social, cultural and technological revolutions in history.

Every year #fotografia Europea invites artists and curators from all over Europe to elaborate on the theme of the #event. This year over 300 projects were sent in response to the 2018 PUBLIC CALL: the best six, selected by a jury composed by Diana Baldon (Director of Fondazione Modena Arti Visive), Laura Gasparini (Head of the Panizzi Library Photographic Archive) and Walter Guadagnini (Art Director of #fotografia Europea) are exhibited in the Ex-ACI space in via Secchi 11 and in the historic GALLERIA PARMEGGIANI.

The SPAZIO EX-ACI DI VIA SECCHI 11, is home to five of the six selected projects: Umberto Coa, Nicolò Panzeri, Simone Sapienza, Andrea e Magda, Danila Tkachenko.

Umberto Coa’s Non dite che siamo pochi (“Do not you say we are just a few”) invents a fictitious story referring to real events and developing within the anarchist insurrectionic movements. The exhibition is based on photographs and documents produced and collected by MB, a fictional character, during his 15 years of militancy in the extremist wings of the movement.

Nicolò Panzeri’s Feed us explores the theme of nutrition, focusing and how man has shaped the food industry in his image.

Starting from a historical, economic and social research, Simone Sapienza’s Charlie surfs on Lotus Flower is a personal metaphorical and symbolical reflection on current Vietnamese society, about forty years after the historic victory of the Vietcongs against the United States .

The duo Andrea and Magda documents, with Birth of Utopia, the creation of Rawabi, the first settlement of the West Bank specifically built for Palestinians and built 9 kilometers away from Ramallah, and twenty from Jerusalem. Rawabi is a utopian city and, at the same time, a private real estate project commissioned by Palestinian-American entrepreneur Bashar Masri.

Motherland, by Danila Tkachenko, was shot in some abandoned villages in the Russian countryside, where objects and structures no longer function nor can be restored. The work of the Russian artist explores the neglect of Russian rural communities, which started with the 1928-1937 collectivization policies.

The GALLERIA PARMEGGIANI venue hosts Francesca Catellani’s Memories in Super8, curated by Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei. The photographic series focuses on socio-anthropological and vision changes, as well as architectural and custom innovation that took place in Italy and Europe between 1970 and 1980. These were also the years of Italian political terrorism and  financial crisis, while philosophies linked to the hippie culture revolution, led to the 80s which were all about hedonism, fashion and mass consumption.

The extraordinary treasure collected by the BIBLIOTECA PANIZZI opens to the public with the exhibition titled Stanislao Farri, l’utopia dell’archivio (“Stanislao Farri, the utopia of the archive”) by Laura Gasparini and Monica Leoni. Farri was one of the leading exponents of the #reggioemilia photographic style, and his archive was acquired by the Reggio-Emilia Library institution in several lots between 1995 and 2007. It consists of 170,000 negative and positive prints that testimony his  professional research activity on local history.

This is the 13^th edition of the Festival, and once again the official program will be integrated by  CIRCUITO OFF, a collective #event in which professionals, amateurs and newcomers will be on show in more than 300 exhibitions and events independently organized and promoted by galleries, associations, public and private institutions all over the town and the surrounding province. These events, in their abundance and variety, animate the festival during the opening days and the following week ends.  

MEETINGS, LECTURES, WORKSHOPS, BOOKS PRESENTATIONS, GUIDED TOURS AND SHOWS are going to take place during the lively opening days and the following weekends until June 17^th, forming a rich and varied proposal. A great opportunity for all those who want to discover the world of Photography and discover its different interesting sides. Many speakers, photographers and others, will alternate on the stage of #fotografia Europea. Among the much-awaited lecturers, it is worth mentioning Belarus-born sociologist and journalist Evgenij Morozov, an expert on new media and their effects on society, with his revolutionary vision on technology.

Not to miss are the shows programmed on Friday and Saturday evening: these are original, site specific productions dedicated to the magic union of photography and music.

This edition sees PORTFOLIO READINGS organized in collaboration with Cortona On The Move as part of the "Sistema Festival Fotografia" network, hosted in the Panizzi Library.

On April 21st and 22nd, national and international photo editors and industry experts  will be available to known or emerging professionals and amateur photographers, to discuss their work and provide advice and suggestions. This year's readers are Monica Allende (GetxoPhoto), Fabio Castelli (Mia Photo #fair, Milan), Giovanna Calvenzi (Donna Moderna), Lucy Conticello (Le Monde), Carine Dolek (Festival Circulation(s), Paris), Renata Ferri (Io Donna, AMICA), Elisa Medde (Foam Magazine), Maysa Moroni (Internazionale), Marina Paulenka (Organ Vida), Arianna Rinaldo (Cortona On The Move), Enrico Stefanelli (Photolux, Lucca).

At the end of the readings, the jury composed by the readers, under Fabio Castelli’s supervision, will chose the 3 best portfolios, which will be published on the #fotografia Europea website. Moreover, the first classified will be exhibited during the 2019 edition of MIA Photo #fair in Milan.

Fotografia Europea also has a careful eye for younger visitors, organizing dedicated guided tours and a rich program full of EDUCATIONAL PROPOSALS: several workshops are offered from the opening weekend until mid-June, so that children and kids get involved in the rich festival program, with a special children’s festival map. Some educational proposals will also be offered to adults during the opening days.

Also in this edition, #fotografia EUROPEA sees its borders widen towards important regional cultural and artistic institutions.

MAST. Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia presents the selected works of the fifth edition of the Mast Foundation For Photography Grant On Industry And Work competition, which started as GD4PhotoArt. The resulting exhibition, under Urs Stahel’s curation, allows MAST to host works by Mari Bastashevski, Sara Cwynar, Sohei Nishino and Cristobal Olivares. From April 20^th  through June 17^th, 2018, it will be possible to watch the exhibition videos at #fotografia Europea, in the Banca d’Italia building.

From May 16^th until September 16^th, 2018, the MAST hosts the extraordinary photographs by the great master WILLIAM EUGENE SMITH.

The CSAC CENTRO STUDI E ARCHIVIO DELLA COMUNICAZIONE DELL’UNIVERSITÀ DI PARMA, hosts the exhibit Figure contro. #fotografia della differenza (“Outsiders. Shooting difference”), photographs and videographic documentation by Carla Cerati, Uliano Lucas, Vito Bonasia, Giuseppe Morandi and Giordano Bonora, who show us the many people who were marginalized during the Italian financial Boom of the Sixties: psychiatric wards, factory workers, women who abandoned traditional roles, civil rights movements, suburban areas, paesants’ communities. 

The COLLEZIONE MARAMOTTI gallery hosts Lutz & Guggisberg, two of the most interesting artists on the international contemporary scene, with il giardino (“The garden”) from April 22^nd till December 30^th, 2018. Cabins, work tools, tables, chairs, brightly colored plastic tubs, boxes, rubber tubes: in the photos everything seems to have been just torn and overturned a few minutes before by a hurricane; this post-apocalyptic visual atmosphere seems to refer to the recent passage of a natural catastrophe, or it might be the destructive work of man. At the same time, these images present an intrinsic beauty, a harmonious composition of colors and shapes in which small lyric details emerge. During the exhibition, on April 21^st and 22^nd, the Atelier dell’Errore BIG opens its studio to general public for the second time, with an exhibition entitled Più penetrante di un cristallo di radio ("Sharper than a radium crystal"). The Atelier will be set up as a room-laboratory with the most recent works inspired by the revolutionary figure of Marie Curie.

FONDAZIONE MODENA ARTI VISIVE, Palazzo Santa Margherita (Modena), hosts the collective exhibition A cosa serve l’utopia (“What is Utopia good for”) curated by Chiara Dall'Olio and Daniele De Luigi, which explores the eternal tension between the hope for change and its subsequent bitter delusion, through the photographic and video works of about thirty artists and photographers present in the collections belonging to the foundation - from Mladen Stilinovic to Akram Zaatari, from Mario De Biasi to Francesco Jodice - in dialogue with some images chosen from the Magnum agency archives.

New collaborations are starting, such as the one with OSSERVATORIO FOTOGRAFICO DI RAVENNA which in connection with our Festival presents the solo exhibition Andante by Alex Majoli,  curated by the MAR- #museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, from April 15^th to June 17^th, 2018. The human condition and the darkest elements of society have always been at the center of Alex Majoli's research, which for the occasion rewrites a new screenplay that explores his path from 1985 until 2018. His journey ends with "theater", an exploration of everyday drama, which blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction.

This year another important collaboration starts with LINEA DI CONFINE PER LA #fotografia CONTEMPORANEA, in collaboration with the Municipality of Rubiera in the Reggio province, which presents orge Ribalta. Flamenco (and other) sketches. Sulla #fotografia come critica culturale (“On photography as cultural criticism”) by William Guerrieri. The exhibition, composed of Ribalta’s series Wild Laocoön, Small History of Photography and Atomium, aims at defending the documentary method as critical analysis of cultural phenomena and representation of the artistic production, which have a fundamental function, although with little awareness, in the construction of national identities.

FOTOGRAFIA EUROPEA 2018 – 13th edition 

REVOLUTIONS. Upheavals, Changes, Utopias

Reggio Emilia, April 20th  - June 17th, 2018

www.fotografiaeuropea.it

Further information: info@fotografiaeuropea.it - info@palazzomagnani.it 

Websites: www.fotografiaeuropea.it – www.palazzomagnani.it