Concept 2019
Bonding. Intimacy, relationships, new worlds is the theme of the 2019 edition of the Fotografia Europea festival, curated by the Scientific Committee of Fondazione Palazzo Magnani – composed by Marina Dacci, Marzia Faietti, Marco Belpoliti, Vanni Codeluppi, Walter Guadagnini, Gerhard Wolf – with Walter Guadagnini’s Art Direction.
The fourteenth edition talks about the human relations: from sentimental relationships, which are more private in nature, to social ones, which naturally mostly take place in the public sphere.
Bonding occurs by a relationship transforming all those who are involved. From “me” we move to “us”, and from “us” we move to “all of us”, welcoming the other from within our horizon, a horizon that is not only ideal: by establishing these relations we define the society we live in.
This is clearly a matter of extraordinary urgency: let it be understood in connection to the past (which level of alteration have we reached in the concept of bonding with territory, space and people, with the phenomena of urbanization still underway on a global level?) or as an insight into the future, in the evolution of a society like ours, currently reaching a new shape in this millennium (our relation with machines and artificial intelligence forces us to further think and re-establish what we know: this is no more science fiction but everyday reality).
These premises allow us to frame endless conceptual and visual elaborations which, in photographic terms, might be summarized by the title of a recent book about the latest developments in photography, L’image partagée (“The Shared image”) by André Gunthert, where the idea of photography modifies its nature because of the act of ‘sharing’ becoming an intrinsic element – which is the result of the new world created by technology. This profoundly influences our concept of intimacy, sometimes in a dramatic negative sense, thus bringing in itself, once again, an elaboration on the meaning of the term “bonding” in today’s society.