It’s the ninth Fotografia Europea Festival, already. This year, the common thread of the Festival, which is sponsored by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, is a reflection upon “the gaze”, based on the lesson of Luigi Ghirri: the theme has been developed through a multifaceted program of exhibits and installations.
Icons, Landscapes and Architectures (Cloisters of San Pietro in Reggio Emilia) is quite an interesting retrospective exhibit on Luigi Ghirri’s work, with 300 shots which confirms the power and topical relevance of his Pensare per immagini (Thinking in Pictures, the title of the exhibit), alongside a vast selection of postcards, books, magazines and vinyl album covers which remind us of his role as an enlightened cultural animator of the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties. The exhibit dedicated to Ghirri is the beacon of this ninth Festival: it is the fil rouge for a path of investigation in which images spark off thoughts.
Visitors to Fotografia Europea can explore this path through various possible thematic focuses: from an analysis of the photography book (the exhibits Without a goal. The book as a photographic thought and Holy Bible by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin) to the unfolding of the surrealist element in photography (Surreal Illusionism on the photo postcards of the early Nineteen Hundreds, the solo exhibit dedicated to the French fashion photographer Sarah Moon and the alternatives gazes of Silvia Camporesi, Paolo Simonazzi and Andrea Ferrari), from the exhibits focusing on the vision of the present and in the present (Simone Bergantini and Massimiliano Tommaso Rezza) through the theme of loss in the Special Eighteentwentyfive project.
The Festival host also Magnum Photos, whose major initiatives include the retrospective of Herbert List, presented for the first time in Reggio Emilia at Fotografia Europea and the group exhibit entitled No Place Like Home in which eight photographers from Magnum tackle the subject of ‘inhabiting’. The Festival includes also the portrait of the artistic career of the CCCP Fedeli alla linea group and their showgirl Annarella, as well as works from the collection of the MAST foundation from Bologna, with a solo exhibit dedicated to Erich Lessing.
But you have to walk in the center of Reggio Emilia, visiting the exhibitions in all their historical venues and chatting with people, to feel the atmosphere of this “photographic period” in the town. Many other events will also take place during the Festival. And the Off Circuit accompanies the Festival with its rich alternative program made up of meetings, projects, exhibits and installations staged in cafés, restaurants, bookstores, galleries and other venues in the city and province of Reggio Emilia.
Fotografia Europea is organized by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia with the contribution of a many curators: Elio Grazioli, Walter Guadagnini, Marinella Paderni, Laura Serani, Denis Curti, Peer-Olaf Richter, Harri Kalha, Laura Gasparini, Francesca Fabiani, Giuliano Sergio, Daniele De Luigi, Urs Stahel, 3/3 (Chiara Capodici and Fiorenza Pinna) and Francesco Zanot.
The exhibited works, curators’ essays and contributions by critics and key participants in the ninth Fotografia Europea Festival are collected in the catalogue published by Silvana Editorale.
FESTIVAL
Fotografia Europea 2014 reggio Emilia
Seeing an infinite gaze
Until 15th June/28th July 2014
42121 Reggio Emilia
Italy
http://www.fotografiaeuropea.it
