Gibellina Photoroad Call For An Open Air Installation 2025

A project will be selected for an open-air and site-specific installation/exhibition, the entrance to the Permanent Collection of Fondazione Orestiadi, and the publication in the catalog and in digital and paper publications.

Overview

What role does vision play in a condition of total openness? How are new meanings created in an empty space? Gibellina Photoroad / Open Air & Site-specific Festival invites photographers, artists and curators to apply to participate in: Call For An Open Air Installation.

A project will be selected for an open air and site-specific installation/exhibition, which will be exhibited in the fifth edition of the festival (20June - 20 August 2025), the entrance in the Permanent Collection of Fondazione Orestiadi, and the publication in the catalog and in digital and paper publications of the festival.

The projects must relate to the Festival’s theme 2025, Timeless.

There is the time of physics, where an object moves from point a to point b, or that of a ray of light imprinted on a negative, to represent a supposed ‘reality’. There is the time of relativity, which depends on the observer. There is the time of logic, of ‘cause and effect’, and historical time, which investigates human progress. It is a time which unfolds like a scroll: it has a beginning, it will have an end. Then there is the time of life, which for Henri Bergson is a ball of thread, an avalanche: each instant contains in its entirety the whole of the past and has in it the germs of the future, and this time is not calculated in minutes or even years. It is an inner, intuitive time, not only memory, but above all unconscious.

It’s just in this time - no clock can measure it- that intuition, the creative act, takes place. It happens perhaps in a dream, or in a double dream, like the one that in Queneau's Les Fleurs bleues links the anti-historical hero Duke D'Auge and the indolent Cidrolin, who lies idle on a barge along the Seine. Each in falling asleep dreams of the other. But if Cidrolin dreams of the Duke, he wakes up a few hours later, in an eternal present, when the Duke dreams of Cidrolin, he wakes up 175 years later: from the Middle Ages he moves on to the Renaissance, the French Revolution, until their absurd meeting in 1964.

What is the meaning of History, of time passing? To what inscrutable end does it aim? At their meeting, the two dreamers find their way out: from their own history, but also from universal History, in search of an impossible utopia of freedom.

The contemporary image has now lost its role as a representation of reality, it has no before or after. It is a theatrical representation in which the unity of time, place and action has been lost. Yet it does not cease to provide us with its meaning, because, as Bergson said: «Life is always creation, unpredictability and at the same time integral and automatic preservation of all the past».

Practical Info

Applicants must submit a single PDF document which should contain the abstract of the project, 22 Images of the project ordered in sequence, a biography, a CV, and the receipt of the payment. The project can only include images to print on adhesive vinyl/pvc. All the photos of the proposed project must be designed to be printed in vertical format. Individuals or groups can apply (no age limit). Groups can be composed of professionals from various disciplines, as long as they present a photographic project.

The selected project will be installed under the Unfinished Theatre by Pietro Consagra in Gibellina, Sicily, during the festival Gibellina Photoroad 2025. The installation will remain on display until June 2026, the year Gibellina is named “Italian Capital of Contemporary Art” by the Ministry of Culture. All costs of production, installation, communication will be entirely covered by the organization.

The winner will also be reimbursed (up to a maximum of €300) to cover their travel expenses during the festival’s opening days (20/22 June 2025). Accommodation will be supplied by the organization. During the Festival’s inauguration, guided tours/talk will be held together with the winner. The prize also includes the printing of a photograph of the project and its inclusion in the Permanent Collection of the Orestiadi Foundation. The work will be selected by the curators.

The jury is composed of Arianna Catania (Founder and Director Festival Gibellina Photoroad), Enzo Fiammetta (Director Museum Fondazione Orestiadi), Andrea Cusumano (Artistic Director Gibellina “Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026”), Walter Guadagnini (Artistic Director CAMERA and Fotografia Europea), Gabriella Guerci (Director MUFOCO), Jessica Jarl (Global Director of Exhibitions, Fotografiska), Louise Fedotov-Clements (Director of Photoworks), and Marie Guillemin (Co-Curator Festival Circulations).

About Gibellina Photoroad

Gibellina Photoroad is a unique and unusual event, the first and unparalleled open air and site-specific festival in Italy, and one of the few in the world. Large-format prints, outdoor exhibitions, projections and installations, thought to dialogue with the urban space of Gibellina, town without any kind of visual and light pollution in which the vision of the exhibitions is not disturbed by the urban chaos.