SPECIALE DICIOTTOVENTICINQUE

Speciale Diciottoventicinque welcomes the gaze of a generation that inhabits an immaterial present, criss-crossed by elusive presences which condition everyday life. Ghosts are no longer just figures from the past, but digital identities that outlive those who created them, collective shadows generated by environmental crises, precariousness, and a lack of autonomy. These are legacies that endure: traces of colonialism that have never completely disappeared, fragments of conflicts that continue to shape our way of seeing
and living.

During the training course, the participants arranged the theme “Ghosts of the Moment” into a set of possible vectors. This led to research which brought to light communities
who have been present in our country for years, fundamental for its economic and cultural wealth, but often made invisible by a dominant white-centric narrative that tends to marginalize those who do not fit the norm, along with works which question the stereotypes and simplifications through which the people belonging to minorities are often looked at. Other investigations focused on the works of architecture that we pass through every day without really seeing them: spaces created to marginalize, built to contain or exclude, urban elements that reveal unexpected narratives when studied and documented photographically.

Ghosts can also be intimate and personal memories: presences that have become absences but continue to exist thanks to the image, transforming gestures, lost words and memories into forms through which to renegotiate the relationship with what is no longer there. In other cases, photography is a means of making the ordinariness of life extraordinary; in still others, a tool to re-elaborate the complexity of living next to a person with an illness, when reality seems to have been shattered and lost its clarity.

The anthological publication that concludes the project thus becomes a visual archipelago, composed of singular gazes that come together in a common vision: that of the world in which today’s young people move, a landscape inhabited by what we see and what we would prefer not to see. In these images, ghosts are not only what scares us, but that which calls out to be recognized.