Fotografia Europea 2024

This year’s festival, inspired by Heraclitus’ famous fragment Nature Loves to Hide, aims to explore the interconnections between humans and nature.

Overview

Fotografia Europea is an international cultural festival dedicated to contemporary photography. The event, created in 2006, is promoted by the Fondazione Palazzo Magnani and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and it won Photo Festival of the Year at the Lucie Awards 2022 in New York.

With artistic direction by Tim Clark (editor & curator 1000 Words), Walter Guadagnini (director of Camera, Torino) and Luce Lebart (photography historian, exhibition curator), Fotografia Europea 2024 attempts to capture nature by exploring how concealment and discovery are interconnected, with this edition's theme Nature Loves To Hide. The rich and diverse photographic series brought together for this edition engage with this sense of double or co-existence as a part of all life on earth. The context is the Anthropocene and histories play out both at a hyper local scale and on the planetary stage to speak to ideas of symbiosis, sustainability and climate emergency. It also looks to partly conjure the positive or transformative actions humans can commit amidst our species’ otherwise dominant axis of control. In the process we undiscover the individual while celebrating ecocentric consciousness to imagine new narratives, forms and interpretations, presenting the various ways concepts of nature have been depicted, and in some cases, destabilised, through photography and film in the contemporary moment.

Authors include Susan Maiselas (in collaboration with Magnum Photos), Helen Sear, Yvonne Venegas, Arko Datto, Matteo De Mayda, Jo Ractliffe, Natalya Saprunova, Terri Weifenbach, Lisa Barnard, Bruno Serraloungue, Karim El Maktafi, Silvia Infranco, Silvia Rosi.

Among the exhibitions, 150 Years Of Capturing Clouds, curated by di Luce Lebart with Michelle Wilson, is a co-production by Fotografia Europea and Archive of Modern Conflict. Curated by Stefania Rössl and Massimo Sordi (OMNE), Index Naturae features 116 photo books published over the last five years exploring the theme of nature. Zone Di Passaggio, curated by Ilaria Campioli promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia (Civic Museums, Panizzi Library) in collaboration with Archivio Eredi Luigi Ghirri, is an exhibition realised thanks to the European Funds of the Emilia-Romagna Region, with the Art Bonus contribution of IREN. In the framework of the abiding dialogue between nature and artifice that runs through the arts, New Theaters Of The Real - Collaborating With AI presents 5 positions in contemporary photography that open the boundary of creation to different modes of collaboration with generative AI.

Shifters by Marta Bogdańska and Nsenene by Michele Sibiloni are the winner works selected among over 500 applications by the jury, made up of the festival’s three artistic directors. The two projects will be exhibited along with other artists in the main venues of the festival.

In addition, for the last eleven years Giovane Fotografia Italiana (Young Italian Photography) has been the project of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia aimed at supporting the work of emerging artists who use the photographic medium to elaborate on the role played by Photography in today’s visual culture as well as in the perception of contemporary world issues. Contaminations is the theme of the 11th edition of the festival. For the occasion, the civic museum Palazzo dei Musei, will showcase the works of under 35 photographers like Camilla Marrese, Claudia Amatruda, Alessandro Truffa, Benedetta Casagrande, Massimiliano Cortellesi, Noemi Comi and Cinzia Romanin.

Plus, a space entirely devoted to publishers, bookshops and presentations of photographic books will be held during the opening days of the Festival (26-28 April), inside the Chiostri di San Pietro.