Concept 2017

Time maps. 

Memory, Archives, Future

The new edition of Fotografia Europea wants to stimulate reflection on memory, archives and future and apply them to factual current issues: forgotten roads, menacing situations, the search for alternatives.

 

We envision the concept of archive not in terms of a space behind closed doors, of a conservative place: on the contrary. This is about a spread-out place where stories and images can be found and used to help us understand our present and imagine our future.

Elio Grazioli, Walter Guadagnini and Diane Dufour explain the values and aspects offered by this issue:

“For us, focusing our quest on the interpretation of archives naturally means asking questions about imaging, about photography. Again: are these pure documents? Recordings? Pieces of data? Interpretations? Expressions? Imaginations? Transfigurations? Does all this belong to the past, the present or the future?

Nowadays, when we file photography into an archive, we often deal with digital data, something immaterial, no film rolls or prints are involved. No more photographic albums to archive our memories: just a folder on our desktop, ready to be shared with tens of thousands of people, friends and strangers alike”.

Going through archives, a photographer finds his inspiration through images: these images from the past change, once pulled out of an archive, and become part of a more or less plausible story, of a more or less applicable utopia.

 

The title Time maps points directly at this power that images have to draw the topographic chart of our memory, as well as the representing a proposal for the future“.

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