Reggio Emilia: exhibitions, installations, conferences, meetings, workshops, screenings, performances.
The inaugural days (15-17 May 2015) will open the tenth edition of Fotografia Europea, dedicated to the relationship between man and nature and included in the Reggio Emilia project for Expo 2015
This year is going to be a very special edition for Fotografia Europea. In celebration of its tenth anniversary, the event in Reggio Emilia proposes a reinterpretation of the themes of Expo 2015, the Universal Exposition in Milan, through a wide-ranging and engaging reflection on the relationship between man and nature. Photographers and curators have been asked to explore areas of investigation linked to the representation of the planet, environmental protection, the riches of the territory, the new equilibriums established between the demands of Earth and human intervention, and the dynamic relationship between man, nature, and technology.
The result is Earth Effect, a guiding thread that ties together the exhibitions, installations, and all the other events in the festival programme. Once again this year, Fotografia Europea is taking a free and interdisciplinary approach, involving many different languages around the core of the major photographic exhibitions. The paths are often unconventional and full of surprises, thanks to the imagination, talent, and brilliance of Italian and international masters. The dialectic between man and nature – the main theme of the event – is explored through novel points of view, such as that of the snails in the Gastrópoda series by Catalonian photographer Joan Fontcuberta, or the story of the uncompleted restoration of a Fiat 500 Topolino in Unfinished Father by Dutch artist Erik Kessels, but also in a series of individual explorations (the panorama on artificial lights in Olivo Barbieri’s Ersatz Lights case study #1 east west) or the multifaceted kaleidoscope of impressive collective shows (No Man Nature, curated by Elio Grazioli and Walter Guadagnini with Diane Dufour).
With the gaze directed from Earth towards the heavens (and vice versa), works that explore our cities, scientific progress, and the relationship with nature, reconstructing the past and revealing the future, complete an exhibition programme brimming with ideas and reflections. The opening days will kick off the festival on the weekend of 15-17 May, with an ample calendar of meetings with the artists, conferences, screenings, workshops, guided tours, and performances.
The Dutch agency NOOR is this year’s special guest in the Host section, and opening night will be entrusted to one of the most famous Italian DJs in the world, Reggio Emilia native Benny Benassi, presenting a completely new set of music and video mapping dedicated to the theme of the fragility of nature and of our planet. The façade of the Teatro Valli will become the surface and backdrop for a video experiment animated by the DJ’s sounds. The images are by Guy Laliberté (the historic founder of Cirque du Soleil), the first artist in space, whose unusual perspective spawned these extraordinary images, a “social and poetic mission” in support of ONE DROP, a project to raise awareness on the issue of the water emergency (Friday 15 May, 9.30 p.m., Piazza Martiri del 7 luglio).
Reinforcing the symbiotic relationship between Fotografia Europea and the city of Reggio Emilia, the tenth edition of the festival adds some new local venues (such as the Renaissance era Palazzo da Mosto, open specially to host the collective exhibition No Man Nature) and new collaborations (such as the one with Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, which to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary will become the partner and protagonist of the photographic project Fotoscopia by Alessandra Calò), in addition to the traditional festival locations (Chiostri di San Pietro, Chiostri di San Domenico, Palazzo dei Musei, Galleria Parmeggiani, Spazio Gerra, Sinagoga, Biblioteca Panizzi, Museo dei Cappuccini).
During the opening days, the map of Fotografia Europea will be enriched by over 200 sites that will host the OFF Circuit with its exhibitions, meetings, and installations, transforming the city into a single pulsating exposition.
Fotografia Europea will also be part of Reggio Emilia for Expo 2015, the city project for the Universal Exposition that aims to promote the Reggio Emilia “system” and highlight the territory’s excellence in innovation and production and its historical, artistic, and cultural wealth. In this regard, the opening days of Fotografia Europea will include the inauguration of the exhibition NOI – Storie di comunità, idee, prodotti and terre reggiane (WE – Stories of the communities, ideas, products, and lands of Reggio Emilia) at Palazzo dei Musei (Saturday 16 May, 12 midnight). Organised by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, Fotografia Europea 2015 has entrusted the advisory committee duties to Elio Grazioli and Walter Guadagnini (ongoing curators of the festival) and Diane Dufour (director of the prestigious Paris venue Le Bal), whose task will be to select the exhibit projects submitted last autumn following the public call for proposals. Due to the special nature of this edition and the connection with Expo 2015, the opening period of the exhibitions has been extended to 26 July 2015.
THE CONCEPT – EARTH EFFECT
In conjunction with Expo 2015 and its call for reflection upon the health of the planet (local areas, food, roots, energy, and so on), Fotografia Europea investigates the relationship between man and nature, focussing not just on the representational and documentary function of photography, but also on its potential for originality and renewal, and on its distinctive approach – with an awareness of how enormously tools, techniques and iconographies have changed in recent decades, and with them, our imagery as well as our reflections. One preliminary aspect concerns the representation of the planet. What kind of new geography is photography able to deliver today? Is there still an antithesis between nature and artifice, between historical memory and new developments, between tradition and future? New places, new methods of representation, new realms of the imagination and new manipulations of the image: these lead not only to novel perspectives but also to different ways of thinking about the past. Depending on the perspective we adopt, from the most internal one to the most dizzyingly external one, the way we experience and consider things clearly changes. How undecipherable certain images produced by science and technology appear to us – in the most unfathomably microscopic images, in those that reveal invisible distances and the most incredible immensity beyond all possible human imagination. How far from reality is technology able take us today – with the possibility it affords to rework and invent images. How close we are able to get to reality through incredibly precise and accurate simulations! While conflicts are denounced and catastrophes are documented, efforts are also being made to find new equilibriums between the demands of nature and human intervention. Art does not confine itself to representing, but frequently feels it ought to act in order to trigger change: from a commitment to depicting the world and its problems, it goes on to design and implement actions involving local areas and communities. It is ‘public art’, and makes an active and performative use of the image, frequently using new technologies in a constructive and shared way. Tensions have become more acute, issues have become more complicated: while on the one hand there is a search for balance and interconnection, on the other there is still a serious risk that everyone will go their own separate way, and that this drifting apart may also involve the (no longer) collective imagination. We can see ‘nature as separate from man’ – powerful and sublime perhaps, but also virgin and serene – as well as ‘man as separate from nature’, thanks to technologies that are so far advanced as to have lost all connection with images of nature. The exhibits in the tenth Fotografia Europea Festival explore these themes, showing that photography still has a role to play in them: a role that is both effective and thought-provoking.
THE EXHIBITS
MAN / NATURE
Country snails, too, can be a source of inspiration. This has been the case for Joan Fontcuberta, the renowned Catalan artist presenting two exhibits in Palazzo dei Musei (Reggio Emilia City Museum), the fruit of the work he has conducted in recent months at the City Museum itself. The new edition of Gastropoda is a project on the life cycle of images that looks at transformation and decay. What sparked this idea was Fontcuberta’s observation of the curious fate of the invitations delivered in his post box, doomed to destruction through the snails’ voracious appetite when the artist is away from home. “It means that images, too, like all living organisms, are born, develop, run their course then decay and die”, explains Fontcuberta – an artist as well as an essayist, a critic, a journalist and a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters, whose works have been shown in retrospective exhibits at the MoMA in New York and the Art Institute in Chicago, and are on show at the Metropolitan in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Fontcuberta has also designed Secret Fauna. Carte Blanche in Lazzaro Spallanzani’s Collection, an exhibit that takes the visitor on a journey through the naturalist collections of the museums based on some apparent discoveries he has come upon while working in the Museum’s archives. Artworks are set among the marvels of nature in an original way and through a constant interaction between the real and the man-made that is characteristic of his artistic poetry. While nature is at the heart of Fontcuberta’s reflections, man is the protagonist of Unfinished Father by Erik Kessels. This is a touching project dedicated to his father, a passionate restorer of Fiat 500 Topolino cars, who suffered a stroke a few years ago. That unfinished Topolino becomes the focus of the exhibit, as well as a symbol of a man who – like the car – will remain unfinished. It has been taken to the Sinagogue where it is on show alongside the photos documenting the various stages of its restoration. It provides a sharp contrast to the ‘happy endings’ we see in films, so different from the real world in which at some point everything is brutally interrupted. Also featured in the spaces of the Synagogue is a project presented by Erik Kessels, the Creative Director of the KesselsKramer agency in Amsterdam: The Topolino in Reggio Emilia, for which the citizens of Reggio Emilia have been invited to participate by contributing their own images of Fiat Topolino cars, rediscovered in their families’ photoalbums. For the occasion, the city of Reggio Emilia, too, has opened its photo-album through the precious collaboration of the Panizzi Library: a group of 12 photographs from its collection will add to the story of the Topolino with glimpses of the city.
NATURE WITHOUT MAN / MAN WITHOUT NATURE
Curated by the three members of Fotografia Europea’s new advisory committee (Elio Grazioli and Walter Guadagnini with Diane Dufour), No Man Nature is a major group exhibit, extraordinary in every respect, including its location: the historic and elegant spaces of Palazzo da Mosto, by courtesy of the Manodori Foundation. The exhibit brings together the works of fourteen artists (Darren Almond, Enrico Bedolo, Ricardo Cases, Pierluigi Fresia, Stephen Gill, Mishka Henner, Ange Leccia e Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Amedeo Martegani , Richard Mosse, Thomas Ruff, Batia Suter, Carlo Valsecchi, and Helmut Völter), who offer a thoughtprovoking way of exploring the topics and issues raised by the Festival’s overarching theme: Earth Effect. Often dominated by technological euphoria, the images offer two hypothetical scenarios that are mutually antithetical but share common apocalyptic connotations: what does nature without man look like? And what might a world in which man renounces nature be like? Further questions and thoughts are triggered by a radical shift in perspective: sky-gazing. The firmament and the way in which man has watched it and photographed it are at the heart of Le cose che si vedono in cielo (The Things We See in the Sky), curated by Ilaria Campioli and staged in the sixteenth-century Cloisters of San Pietro. The exhibit explores the relationship between man and the universe – a subject of passionate discussion and the originator of cosmogonies since antiquity. At a time when we are getting more and more detailed images from more and more distant places, artists are feeling the need to claim back this space of the imagination. The exhibiting artists reinvent and take apart the archetypal images of the cosmos, and lead us to consider how deeply our vision of nature is influenced by the visual memory built up over the years. The exhibit is based on a selection of recent publications, showing the importance accorded by the Festival to the photo-book (previously featured in the 2014 exhibit Without a Goal. The Photo-Book as Photographic Thought).
REINVENTING THE WORLD
198 colour photographs, shot over a working period spanning thirty years, make up the mosaic of Ersatz Lights. Case study #1 east west, an exhibit featuring the works of Olivo Barbieri, on display in the Cloisters of San Pietro. The exhibit, organized with the advisory coordination of Laura Gasparini and produced by the Panizzi Library in collaboration with the Emilia Romagna Region, the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and Azienda Speciale Villa Manin – Udine, has an accompanying catalogue published by the German publisher Hatje Cantz. By “ersatz lights” we mean everything we have invented as a substitute for natural light: artificial surrogates of sunlight that become key features of the images, enabling us to discover previously unseen aspects of reality. The images range from Eastern megalopolises, to the suburban areas of European cities, and Italian urban and rural landscapes, highlighting the language of an artist who has shown a consistent ability to personalize his shots by working on focus-setting, balance of colour, and on previously untried and innovative techniques. Another step towards the “reinvention” of the world was the research conducted by the celebrated scientist Charles Darwin during his circumnavigation of the globe aboard HMS Beagle, which laid the foundations for his On the Origin of Species (1859). The young Hungarian photographer Ákos Czigány pays tribute to the renowned scientist and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, with his exhibit Travelling with Darwin, curated by Gigliola Foschi, (Galleria Parmeggiani). Czigány has reproduced some blank pages from the first editions of Darwin’s books, sourced from the Internet, and arranged them into grids. Seen from a distance these pages seem like abstract artworks, while from close up they reveal the marks of time. The Festival programme features a host of events illustrating the key role played by new technologies in the photographic narrative and in the photographic language. They include the exhibit Cluster | New Jersey Counties by Daniele Lisi, in the Cloisters of San Domenico. Here, the Internet-sourced satellite images of the Meadowlands area of New Jersey – turned into a residential neighbourhood through a land reclamation project almost a century ago – offer a geometrical perspective that transforms into a “Lived Space” in the second chapter of the project, with images of those same places portrayed here during the night time. A more abstract approach playing on light, almost as if to close the circle opened by Ersatz Lights, is offered by Luca Gilli with his exhibit entitled Blank, in the Cloisters of San Pietro. In this collection of images, the light is not ‘turned on’ to brighten the darkness but spreads seamlessly and is almost over-luminous, confounding (reinventing) our perception of the forms, materials and volumes of the represented objects.
RE-NARRATING MAN
The story of man can be told through human inventions, including the most controversial ones. By combining existing materials (made for educational and promotional purposes) with his own videos and photos, the Swiss photographer Jules Spinatsch has produced a narrative in images on nuclear technology from the Cold War to the present day. The outcome is Asynchronous, an exhibit curated by Daniele De Luigi, held in the Cloisters of San Domenico. Also based on archive materials, sets of photos and documents found between 2009 and 2010 to be precise, is Found Photos in Detroit, a project by Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese, also on shown in the Cloisters of San Domenico. The two young artists, who co-founded Gruppo Cesura, tell of the decadence and abandon in the American metropolis, not just by delivering an image of the present but also by reconstructing the process and trends that led to it. Another place, much closer in time and space, is the focus of Fotoscopia , a project by Alessandra Calò, curated by Irene Russo and created for Fotografia Europea in collaboration with the General Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Reggio Emilia. This photographic survey narrates the first fifty years in the Hospital’s life, transforming it from a stage where medical examinations and tests are performed to an object of study which the public of the Festival can visit and examine in the exhibition held in the Parmeggiani Art Gallery. A life that did not reach half a century but sadly ended at the age of 37 is that of Sergio Romagnoli, the teacher of natural science and geography, a naturalist with a passion for photography, killed in 1994 – in circumstances that are still unclear – in the island Sao Tomè, off the coast of Africa. Curated by Alessandro Calabrese and Milo Montelli and staged in the Cloisters of San Domenico, A Drop in the Ocean reconstructs a historical record of the work done by Romagnoli between the Seventies and Eighties. Fotografia Europea’s cross-disciplinary programme, subject to unexpected and unpredictable mutations, moves freely along the line of time and space. In Herculaneum (curated by Massimo Mussini, Cappuccini Museum), Marcello Grassi leads visitors on a journey of discovery of the Roman city buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. These images of a rediscovered myth are also a warning against a future that could become menacing once again, and urge us to reflect on the humility and precariousness of man in the face of history (and nature). Space, and the threshold in particular, seen as a place of passage and metamorphosis, is the starting point of St()ma, a multimedia project that tells of change and mutation by intertwining music composed by Cristiano Calcagnile with images by Bruno Pulici. An innovative event that can be experienced in the Cloisters of San Domenico. Finally, a fusion takes place between the story of man and the story of nature in Speciale Diciottoventicinque , by now a regular feature of Fotografia Europea, targeted at young people aged between 18 and 25. Over eighty young artists, divided into four groups, are presenting their works at the Cloisters of San Pietro, all linked to the Festival’s overarching theme: Earth Effect. The images shot by the young photographers are arranged in four sections: The Earth, the Soil and the Stories; The Earth, the Land and Man; The Earth, the Land and Food; and The Earth and the Land. These investigations are not pursued in isolation but are always mutually interwoven through the coordination of the tutors/professional photographers Alessandro Bartoli, Fabio Boni, Fabrizio Cicconi and Laura Sassi. 5.
WHAT’S NEW: THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE AND REGGIO EMILIA FOR EXPO 2015
Starting this year, Fotografia Europea has an advisory committee. Composed of two curators who have already worked with the festival for some time (Elio Grazioli of the University of Bergamo and Walter Guadagnini of the Accademia of Belle Arti of Bologna) and “new entry” Diane Dufour (Director of Le Bal, the new Paris venue created on a project of the Association des Amis de Magnum Photos, dedicated to the representation of reality through the image in all its forms: photography, video, film, and new media), the committee first and foremost had the task of judging the 210 photographic projects submitted in last autumn’s public call for proposals. Eight projects were selected for the official circuit of Fotografia Europea 2015: Travelling with Darwin (Ákos Czigány), Asynchronous (Jules Spinatsch), Found Photos in Detroit (Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese), A Drop in the Ocean – Sergio Romagnoli (curated by Alessandro Calabrese and Milo Montelli), St()ma (Bruno Pulici and Cristiano Calcagnile), Cluster | New Jersey Counties (Daniele Lisi), Blank (Luca Gilli), and Herculaneum (Marcello Grassi). The three members of the committee also curated No Man Nature, the collective exhibition on display at Palazzo da Mosto. The other important news of the tenth edition of Fotografia Europea is its participation in Reggio Emilia for Expo 2015, the project based on the local territory that accompanies the Universal Exposition in Milan running from 1 May to 31 October 2015. With the aim to promote the Reggio Emilia “system” and highlight the production excellence of the local territory as well as its historical, artistic, and cultural wealth, the initiative involves a series of events dedicated to agriculture, food, and environment, in line with the theme of Expo 2015. The calendar of events has been organised to reinforce the collaboration and synergy between the two initiatives, so the first weekend of Fotografia Europea (Saturday 16 May) will also feature the inauguration the exhibition NOI – Storie of comunità, idee, prodotti and terre reggiane, (WE – Stories of the communities, ideas, products, and lands of Reggio Emilia) on display at Palazzo dei Musei, curated by Luca Molinari, critic and curator of international events and scientific coordinator of the Expo 2015 cluster. The exhibition, covering the entire building, offers a transversal narrative of the land, its community, and the ability to give shape to products, ideas, and ways of being, thinking, and living together. NOI, like Fotografia Europea 2015, will be part of a broader reflection on our present: complex, stratified, in search of paths that make it possible to build and achieve a sustainable future attentive to the changes taking place, without forgetting the patrimony of history and knowledge that a land such as the province of Reggio Emilia has distilled over the centuries. T
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