Giulia Morassutti. L'Attimo Fuggente

Produced by Fotografica APS, L’Attimo Fuggente presents Giulia Morassutti’s intimate portraits of friends, family and chance encounters. Mostly in black and white, they explore fleeting moments, the passage of time and the bonds between people.

Friends, family members, people met by chance. These are the faces Giulia Morassutti chooses to photograph, capturing in a single shot, at most two, something of a moment that will never return: an expression, a gaze, the way someone allows themselves to be seen. This exploration gives rise to L’Attimo Fuggente, the exhibition presented by Fotografica APS at the Monastero del Carmine in Bergamo from 17 October to 1 November.

Produced by the Festival and co-curated with Giovanna Brambilla, who also curated Morassutti’s first solo exhibition, the show is a special event outside the festival programme during Fotografica Bergamo Festival’s year-long pause. The festival will return for its sixth edition in 2027.

The decision to dedicate an exhibition to Giulia Morassutti’s photography continues the exploration that runs through every edition of Fotografica: telling the stories of our times and the people who inhabit them, allowing their faces and stories to raise new questions about contemporary life.

“Even during this year’s pause, we want to continue telling the story of the times we live in through photography. For Fotografica, this interval becomes an opportunity to make room for young artists whose perspectives explore the present with sensitivity,” explains Daniela Sonzogni, co-curator and Director of Fotografica Bergamo Festival. “If human beings have always been at the heart of Fotografica, seen through their vulnerabilities, their bonds, their transformations and their irreducible dignity, Giulia embraces that spirit and interprets it through a personal, intimate and rigorous gaze.”

Morassutti’s portraits, mostly in black and white and enhanced by the exhibition design by architects Marcella Datei and Davide Rohrich, are all close-ups. Giulia approaches her subjects with care and sensitivity, seeking in their gaze a presence that photography can preserve, while knowing that each instant is unique within the passage of time. In some images, the same people reappear years later: the comparison reveals both the ageing of their faces and the enduring relationships that have allowed Giulia to photograph them again.

The exhibition is hosted by the Monastero del Carmine, a place shaped by many different lives over five centuries, a venue for successive editions of Fotografica Bergamo Festival and, since 1996, home to Teatro tascabile di Bergamo. “If portraiture is the art of making a presence visible,” writes Giovanna Brambilla in her introductory text, “TTB does the same through the living bodies of its actors, but with one difference: a theatrical portrait cannot be preserved; it must be recreated and rethought each time, and this is precisely where its strength lies. Giulia’s photographs, meanwhile, express the desire to hold on to a moment, with an awareness of the fleeting nature of existence. The fleeting moment is the one our gaze cannot capture, because it often slips away before we can even reach it.” A portrait also emerges from the relationship with the person in front of the lens: “Giulia welcomes them and gives them space, in a two-way relationship: for her, recognising another person also means recognising herself.”

“Within the spaces of the Monastero del Carmine, L’Attimo Fuggente invites us to pause before these faces and reflect on time and our relationship with others. This is the meaning we continue to give to Fotografica: telling the story of the world through people’s lives and creating opportunities for encounter and reflection around images,” Sonzogni concludes.

About the artist
Giulia Morassutti, born in 2000, lives in Bergamo. She first became interested in photography at the Giacomo e Pio Manzù art high school and continued her studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti Giacomo Carrara in Bergamo. In 2018, she won the secondary-school category of the award established in memory of Don Sergio Colombo. In 2022, she took part in the group exhibition Qualcosa del genere in Nembro, where she also presented her first solo exhibition, Inside Out, between 2023 and 2024. Both exhibitions were curated by Giovanna Brambilla.