Change is a word not related exclusively to megalopolis. Reggio Emilia is a city in northern Italy, where tradition and quiet life not necessarily request apparently such changes. . But the changes are everywhere and this year Reggio Emilia wants to show it.
The 8th Edition of “European Photography” Festival started with a long weekend, from the 3rd to the 5th of May , full of events, workshops, talks and opening of exhibitions which will be on show until June 16th, in many – amazing – venues. This year, the title of the festival is Change.
The curators of the festival have selected four different ways to introduce us on how responsible photography is to making changes.
Changing the image. In this section three selected authors who represent a photography that seems to have something strange, not usual, something that we could recognize as different or “estranged”. Rinko Kawauchi presents “Illuminance”, a delicate series dedicated to the changes due to light and shadow and their impossibility to stay together. Philippe Chancel’s images focus on the dimension of time and delay with images from Fukushima, Kabul, Haiti and North Korea when news media coverage turn off attention. People can be very estranged and absolutely eccentric or freaked as in the staged portraits of David Stewart.
Trust: change ourselves. If the world changes, we must change too. The main group exhibition of this section is called “Vita Nova” (from latin, new life) and it describes the passage from childhood, adolescence and maturity through the images of Evan Baden, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Luigi Gariglio, Paul Graham, Lise Sarfati, Hannah Starkey, Hellen van Meene, Raimond Wouda and Tobias Zielony. In the same section, at photography center Spazio Gerra a solo show of Mick Rock, the most glamour photographer in Reggio Emilia, who was a rock star behind the camera looking at David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Freddie Mercury, Lou Reed, Syd Barrett. We should trust ourselves in difficult situation , Anders Petersen was invited in Reggio Emilia last year to document the city and people after the tragic earthquake of 2012.
Surprise. This is about our reactions to the changes of the world. What about the imaginary Space Project planned by Zambia in the 60’s? Cristina De Middel plays with an impossible but realistic story The Afronauts. What about Chernobyl today? In the suggestive Synagogue, the images of Sergey Shestakov show how the past can survive in the present. What about the recovery of a centuries-old theatre? Its magic and decadent atmosphere has been poetically and terrifically documented by Alessandro Rizzi.In the Surprise section Sergey Shestakov, has a second group dedicated to Russian photography with Viktoria Sorochinski, Lucia Ganieva and Tim Parchikov.
The last section Vision interpreted as the beginning of the changes , the curators include Esko Mannikko, Thierry Cohen, Andrea Galvani and Stefano D’Amadio.
Almost all coffee bars and shops in Reggio Emilia, during the festival, have some small photo exhibition . They are included in the section OFF.
Outside of the four sections, there are two great homages to two important authors in the history of photography: the american Weegee at Palazzo Magnani and the Italian Carla Cerati at Chiostri di San Domenico.
Eliseo Barbàra
MoST Artists
Fotografia Europea 2013
Untill June 16, 2013
Reggio Emilia, Italy
Many locations
