Fotografia Europea 2017

From May 5th till July 9th the town of Reggio Emilia is hosting a new edition of the EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHY festival, promoted by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation in collaboration with the Municipality of Reggio Emilia; the event focuses on Photography as the art form that best communicates and interprets the complexity of contemporary society.

Exhibitions, lectures, performances, special and educational events will take place in the main cultural institutions and exhibition spaces of the town. Personalities coming from the worlds of photography, culture and knowledge, will elicit a dialogue among different expressions of creativity and thinking, thanks to a rich and wide program.

Palazzo Magnani

Ideally, the tour of the 2017 European Photography festival starts at Palazzo Magnani, which hosts the exhibition Paul Strand e Cesare Zavattini. Un Paese. La storia e l’eredità. Here the visitor will be able to see 88 original photos, author’s prints and unpublished materials by Paul Strand, courtesy of prestigious international museums (Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAPFRE, Madrid; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Aperture Foundation, New York).

This exhibit revolves around one of the first photo books ever produced in Italy: Un Paese – Portrait of an Italian Village, first published by Einaudi in 1955. The images of the U.S. photographer and the texts of the Italian author come together in this book, largely influenced by the Italian Neorealismo, to tell the lives and stories of humble inhabitants of a small village in the Po Valley, Luzzara, chosen as a mirror of the spirit of a community as well as of the universal rhythm of these lives connected to their land.

The exhibition also offers the opportunity to explore how the book was an inspiration to more authors, photographers, writers and artists, by becoming a reference in photography and literature in terms of exploring the relationship between image and writing: photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin (who collaborated with Zavattini on Un Paese, Twenty Years Later in 1976), Stephen Shore, Olivo Barbieri, including Claudio Parmiggiani’s artistic research, will be on display.

Chiostri di San Pietro
One of the main exhibition areas of the festival will host a number of extraordinary exhibits.
Lo Studio di Berengo Gardin, by Alessandra Mauro, Laura Gasparini and Susanna Berengo Gardin, investigates how an archive becomes the space for reflection and creation, not only a place where the memory of one’s work is stored. This will offer the opportunity to observe the creative process of the famed Italian photographer by exploring his work tools: his cameras, his equipment, some of his contact prints. This exhibit revolves around his archive and his personal way of filing negatives, test prints, original prints, but also books, catalogues and objects.

The exhibit A Short History of South African Photography, by Rory Bester, Thato Mogotsi and Rita Potenza, is divided in two sections. The first one tells the story of South Africa, while the second deals with the role played by photography in capturing that story. Both visualize the complexity of daily life in South Africa from post WWI until today (1918-2017) through a selection of 100 photographs coming from archives, museums and collections.

Enrico Bossan and Walter Guadagnini are the curators of Up to Now. Fabrica Photography, the exhibition dedicated to Fabrica, the extraordinary Communication Research Center founded by Luciano Benetton in the town of Treviso in 1994. Images, magazines, historical documents, as well as new photographic researches and young creators’ experimentations are on display, allowing the viewer to capture the innovative and interdisciplinary approach to image and social communication that constitutes the trademark of the Benetton Group.

The project Les Nouveaux Encyclopédistes by curator Joan Fontcuberta elaborates on the concepts of classification, encyclopedia and knowledge through the use of photography. This is a homage to D’Alambert and Diderot, passing on to Foucault and Aby Warburg, reaching to Hans Peer Feldman. Several photographic projects dealing with the idea of accumulation and vision will be on display, from Joachim Schmid’s work to the evocative installation (a composition of 250,000 pictures) by Roberto Pellegrinuzzi.

Having had such a great success in the previous editions, the project Speciale Diciottoventicinque will also be present at the Chiostri di San Pietro exhibition area: twenty young artists (aged 18 to 25) have been working under Giuseppe De Mattia’s supervision on Giovanni Marconi’s private archives. Giovanni Marconi, born in 1922 in the Emilia region and currently living in Bolzano (Northern Italy), is an ordinary man who has made available to us an impressive quantity of images covering his whole life, from his birth till his 95th birthday, including life during WWII, working abroad, and all the changes a man goes through in a lifetime that almost lasts a century.

Chiostri di San Domenico
The exhibition space Chiostri di San Domenico will host the works of Tommaso Bonaventura, Jan de Cock, Aleix Plademunt and Moira Ricci, who have been invited to elaborate in modern terms their approach to the 1955 photo book Il Paese by Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini. They all found their way to work on the subject: Jan De Cock elaborated on the concept of “Monument” as a “Way of Thinking” that involves history, arts, personal and collective experiences. Moira Ricci revisited her origins in the Maremma region in Tuscany through a series of made-up characters, like the wild-boar girl and the stone man, who are documented as if they were real and believable. Aleix Plademunt bases his analysis of settings on the principle of approximation rather than documentation, where reality and imagination get mixed up. Tommaso Bonaventura goes beyond the local meanings of his settings, departing from the inherent dramatic quality of some of his themes, like the crime organization Mafia in his series Corpi di reato; similarly, he works on the spectacular aspects of popular imagination in If I Were Mao.

Palazzo da Mosto
Palazzo da Mosto will host some exhibit projects to show different ways to use archives to collect, investigate, show and edit images.

Daniel Blaufuks’ project Attempting Exhaustion, inspired by Georges Perec, describes what happens when portraying something apparently irrelevant like inanimate objects. In A Failed Entertainment, Alessandro Calabrese reflects on the role of being an author in photography as opposed to the proliferation of visual materials online. In his series Wallpaper, Kurt Caviezel collects images from the whole world using web cams placed in public and private spaces, turning his computer into a photo camera itself. In Negative Publicity, Edmund Clark and Crofton Black create a composition of photos and documents about the nature of contemporary conflicts, commenting on the invisible mechanisms of state-run control. In Wolfgang, David Fathi composes the portrait of one of the founders of quantum physics, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, using both real data and legends. Agnès Geoffray manipulates archive images, turning them into something different in Incidental Gestures. The last project on show is Lay Out, in which Teresa Giannico – after having researched real online ads – goes on a quest through shared apartments in Milan.

Public Call

Like every year, a Public Call was held by the Festival, inviting European photographers to send in their projects regarding the year theme, to be selected to the official Fotografia Europea circuit. For the 2017 edition, more than 600 projects were sent in; the authors selected by the scientific committee will be on show at the former ACI headquarters and at the Parmeggiani Gallery: Double Slit Experiment by Marjolein Blom; Giorgio Di Noto’s The Iceberg by curator Paola Paleari; Eva Pacalova’s Hello Grandpa! Visual reaction to the Grandpa´s pragmatic questions about the world; and Kukka-Maria Rosenlund ‘s Inner Manual Distortion.

Palazzo dei Musei
The Palazzo dei Musei hosts the exhibit LOOP – Giovane Fotografia Italiana #05, by curator Daniele De Luigi, in which seven artists under 35 years of age will be on show. This initiative, promoting emerging Italian photographers, is supported by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia together with GAI – Associazione per il circuito dei Giovani Artisti Italiani, in collabration with BJCEM – Biennale des jeunes créateurs de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Circulation(s) Festival de la Jeune Photographie Europeenne (Paris) and the Belfast Photo Festival.

Spazio Gerra
The Spazio Gerra gallery will host Community Era – Echoes From The Summer Of Love, by ICS – Innovazione Cultura Società. In the 50th anniversary of what came to be known as the Summer of Love, this group exhibit searches for what is left of the hippie community, trying to identify its influence in today’s world through a selection of famed U.S photographers’ works who were real protagonists of the cultural revolution that originated in California in the second half of the 60s and spread throughout the western world.

Museo di Storia della Psichiatria
The Museo di Storia della Psichiatria hosts Christian Fogarolli, who was asked to create an original production starting from the collections and the archives of the Psychiatric History Museum. Here scientific disciplines like medicine, psychiatry, anthropology and archeology are seen through creative and artistic lens: the exhibit Satelliti is a study of the photographic material found in the former psychiatric ward. These images relate more to the aesthetic values of the arts than to the psychiatric science, while at the same time strong analogies to police mug shots and criminal photography emerge.

The Biblioteca Panizzi, is going to be home to Foto graphia. Tra immagine e parola, by curators Laura Gasparini, Giulia Lambertini and Monica Leoni: an educational journey in the public collections starting from historical daguerreotypes, salted papers, albumen prints all the way up to digital cameras. Interestingly, most of these images were created as part of edited materials such as albums, imposition dummies, portfolios, and published books.
The 2017 edition of Fotografia Europea also sees the confirmation of the ongoing collaboration with the most important institutions of the region operating in the field of photographic research. Important projects will be managed during the Festival, in the towns along the main artery of the region, the Via Emilia; these projects are being supported by CSAC (Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione) of Parma, by Collezione Maramotti of Reggio Emilia, by Fondazione Fotografia of Modena and by Fondazione MAST of Bologna.

This is the 12th edition of the Festival, and once again the official program will be integrated with the Circuito Off. More than 300 exhibitions and events independently organized and promoted by galleries, associations, public and private institutions are to take place all over the town and the surrounding province.