The program also includes OFF circuit, the free and independent section of Fotografia Europea enriched by the initiative of individuals, galleries, associations and public and private institutions
The 2023 edition of Fotografia Europea
The 2023 edition of Fotografia Europea, the international cultural festival dedicated to contemporary photography promoted by the Fondazione Palazzo Magnani and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, opens on the 28th of April. The festival is under the artistic direction of Walter Guadagnini, director of CAMERA Torino, Tim Clark, editor of 1000 Words and curator of Photo London Discovery and Luce Lebart, french photography historian, exhibition curator and researcher that this year joins the team that has been working since the first edition in 2006.
On display until the 11th of June at the Chiostro di San Domenico, Chiostri di San Pietro, Palazzo Da Mosto and Palazzo dei Musei, Spazio Gerra and Biblioteca Panizzi, photographic projects and exhibitions are accompanied by a program of events, conferences, screenings, workshops, portfolio reviews and site-specific performances reflecting on the idea of Europe, its identity and community seeking, with the idea of expanding and engaging with the city of Reggio Emilia and its community in its whole, remembering that the festival is also an on-going project, with the photo library in the Biblioteca Panizzi. The program also includes OFF circuit, the free and independent section of Fotografia Europea enriched by the initiative of individuals, galleries, associations and public and private institutions that offers exhibitions and events all over the territory during the festival days.
The variety of geopolitical situations at Fotografia Europea
«The photographic projects in the exhibition narrate the different faces of a continent, without claiming to exhaust its infinite identities. A continent that is going through a particular period, marked by traumas and hopes, by potentialities that meet and clash with equal difficulties and complexities, both politically and culturally. This is what the projects on display are about: the variety of geopolitical situations and the fact that seeing and communicating these aspects ‘matters’, it gives meaning to the act of photographing and exhibiting», explains director Walter Guadagnini.
This year’s editions includes the annual exhibition on Luigi Ghirri on Europe’s gardens at Palazzo dei Musei, together with the exhibition with works by finalists of the competition Giovane Fotografia Italiana #10 on the theme of ownership; Chiostri di San Domenico will host exhibitions by Mattia Balsamini, Myriam Meloni and Camilla de Maffei; Chiostri di San Pietro Sabine Weiss, Monica de Miranda, Jean-Marc Caimi e Valentina Piccinn, Simon Roberts, The Archive of Public Protests, Alessia Rollo, Sauel Gratacap, Yelena Yemchuk, Geoffroy Mathieu, Cédrine Scheidig; Palazzo Mosto will host an exhibition by Ariane Loze and The Ars Devi collection from Sarajevo; Spazio Gerra the exhibition by Roberto Masotti; Biblioteca Panizzi Flashback, the exhibition on the 2007’s edition on the same topic. «The difference with the edition from 2008 is in the photographic language; Instagram did not yet exist. At the same time, however, one also notices the continuity of the theme’s presence in the thinking of both photographers and the community at large: thinking about Europe, about its identity, remains a present thought and never as central to public debate as it has been in recent decades», explains the director.
Europe ‘Matters’
In the title, the word ‘matters’, linked to the idea of care, strikes. Director Guadagnini explains the idea behind it: «The fact that Europe matters means that it matters to talk about Europe, in plural terms, on some of the many topics that make up our identity today. An identity that, as the subtitle points out, is restless, meaning that it is on the move, that does not rest on its certainties (if ever there were any), but lives on questions, interrogations, even tensions. An identity that continually questions itself, due to internal and external factors».
Multiculturalism and conflicts presented at Fotografia Europea
All exhibitions and venues will depict the fragile and precarious identity of Europe, questioning its multifaceted and multicultural nature. Guadagnini adds: «Multiculturalism is not only a central theme of contemporary photography, it is a central theme of the world. I personally remember this term becoming crucial in the debate in the 1980s, just think of the music of those years or exhibitions such as ‘Magiciens de la terre’, just to mention two among a thousand possible examples and to highlight how the theme comes from afar». Topics such as human rights protests, traces of colonial pasts that create layers of meanings and existences, wild plant pickers that show new outcomes for citizens to to think on how to inhabit and co-habit landscapes, what is left of ghostly cities touched by catastrophes or conflicts that find a way to live on.
The theme of conflict is central in the Ars Aevi collection on view at Palazzo Mosto: «The Ars Aevi collection was born as a reaction of the European and world art community to the tragedy of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s; it is a gesture of solidarity and rebirth in the name of art in the face of what we all thought had been the last war on the European continent. Showing it today, when current events have brought us back inside that climate, to listen to war bulletins from two European countries, one attacked and the other the aggressor, is meant to be a further signal for reflection not only on the issue of war, but also on the need to never take anything for granted, that every inch of the freedom and peace that have been won and increased in Europe by the generations before us must be defended every day, in every thought and every action. Even in the cultural sphere, because contrary to what is sometimes claimed, this is not neutral ground».
The Erasmus project
One of the topics on which the festival committee thought about was the Erasmus project. In someway Myriam Meloni, on view at Chiostri di San Domenico, has deepened this topic that the director explains like this: «There is even a term, ‘Erasmus generation’, for those who have benefited, in the most diverse ways, from this project. In my opinion, as a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts, I can say that I have seen the most varied approaches and results to this experience: while for the vast majority of the young people it has been above all a time of fun and of breaking out of the daily patterns of family and school, for others it has been a real reason for training, for becoming aware of the existence of the enormous possibilities that were opening up by thinking in European terms instead of national terms. The greatest merit of Erasmus I think was this, to be one of the many ways, in parallel with low-cost flights, in which the world got even smaller – today’s generations, apart from the unfortunate Brexit affair, see Europe as a whole, with no need for intellectual elaboration, that’s a given – and to be at the same time the accelerator of a union that institutions often have a much harder time explaining».
Nature and community building at Fotografia Europea
This year’s annual exhibition on Luigi Ghirri at Palazzo dei Musei will be in Europe’s gardens. Geoffrey Mathieu’s exhibition will be on edible wild plant pickers on the fringes of Paris that reimagine our appreciation and dependence on nature, just to cite two examples. Guadagnini explains the link between nature and community in this year’s edition.
«In an age where the most used-and often abused-terms are those of climate change and sustainability (to which I personally prefer the French ‘durabilité’, more appropriate). I believe that the link between nature and community is not only significant, but is simply unavoidable. However, we live on a continent where more than 70 percent of the population lives in urban areas, and therefore has a special relationship with nature, if at all. The concept of nature itself is changing, and what we think about nature today, from a no longer anthropocentric perspective, is profoundly different from what we thought just a few decades ago. Photography can provide images that help us to reflect, that induce us to explore certain themes: Luigi Ghirri’s exhibition, for example, takes us back to a different time, in which certain elements were for the community discoveries, novelties, while those of Matteo Balsamini or Geoffrey Mathieu take us into the present day, facing a problem-that of visual pollution-and facing answers-the gatherers of wild plants-that directly involve communities, solicit or document their reactions».
The relevance of the photobook
Central for the festival is also the photobook, with the FE + SK Book Award, in collaboration with the publishing house Skinnerboox, and the PARENTESI Book Fair, a space entirely devoted to publishers, bookshops and presentations of photography.
«The book has always been present in the Festival’s programs, both through the presentation of a space specifically dedicated to independent publishing and through the presentations of individual volumes. This is because the centrality of the publishing product is one of the founding features of photography and its history, which was made, at least until the 1980s, mainly through the publication of images in magazines and in book form. Today the situation is different, the book has often become a kind of space of freedom within an increasingly standardized world, editorially and photographically. So it is a space that needs to be safeguarded and made visible and usable, and there is no better occasion than a festival to cross the gazes of thousands of people who love photography and who can find in such cases an opportunity to meet images and authors, even less well-known ones».
Fotografia Europea: Reggio Emilia and photography
On the reason for organizing the contemporary photography festival in the city of Reggio Emilia Walter Guadagnini explains: «First of all, a fact related to history and cultural geography should be emphasized, namely the fact that Reggio Emilia is located in the center of a region that has been one of the driving centers of photography in Italy since the 1960s. The Galleria Civica in Modena was practically the first public institution to propose a program of exhibitions of then young photographers who answered to the names of Vaccari, Ghirri, Basilico, Castella; the CSAC in Parma was the first Italian public institution to seriously collect contemporary photography; near Reggio Luigi Ghirri was born and worked (and together with him a different figure such as Vasco Ascolini, a great interpreter in particular of the photography of reproduction and interpretation of sculpture, should be remembered). Here, this is the humus from which this Festival was born, which not by chance has established itself over the years as the most relevant at the national level, culminating in the recognition of ‘Festival of The Year’ at the Luce Awards in New York last year».
The meaning of being ‘Italian’ at Fotografia Europea
As the director explained, the city of Reggio Emilia has always been linked to the history of photography. Especially in the 1980s, when Luigi Ghirri, Cesare Ballardini, Cesare Fabbri, Jonathan Frantini, Marcello Galvani, Guido Guidi, Francesco Neri and Luca Nostri amongst others looked the meaning of being ‘Italian’ in the Provincia. Cesare Zavattini used to call it ‘Qualisiasità’, referring to the disenchanted gaze, the photography of the everyday, the attention to the minor aspects of the territory and the landscape as the primary place of observation, meaning. Here is where they looked for their identity, in the nowness, and in the simultaneity of the different identities is where Europe’s identity may be looked for. With a gaze upon different realities, not necessarily coincident yet strictly entangled.
Fotografia Europea
Reggio Emilia, Italy. Fotografia Europea is an international cultural festival dedicated to contemporary photography.
The festival, created in 2006, is promoted by the Fondazione Palazzo Magnani and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and it won Photo Festival of the Year at the Lucie Awards 2022 in New York. Fotografia Europea uses photography as a tool to reflect upon the complexity of contemporary living following the lesson of the local photographer Luigi Ghirri, a prominent figure in the late ‘900s photography’s renewal, whose archive is stored in the city.
The festival takes place in different locations of the city, both public and private, formal and informal, and it consists of a central core of exhibitions among which new ad hoc commissioned productions, related to a specific theme identified every year by the Scientific Committee. The exhibitions are accompanied by a rich program of events, conferences, screenings, workshops, portfolio reviews and site specific performances.
