Gibellina Photoroad Festival 2025

Gibellina Photoroad is an unusual open-air and site-specific festival in Sicily, Italy, featuring large-format prints, outdoor exhibitions, projections and installations.

Overview

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».

Large-format prints, outdoor exhibitions, projections and installations, thought to dialogue with the urban space of Gibellina, a town without any kind of visual and light pollution in which the vision of the exhibitions is not disturbed by the urban chaos. The festival questions how photography can shape itself in urban space, in the public space, finding new meanings, visions and interactions with the audience. And how photography can revitalize the memory, activating the contemporary creations.

Among the exhibited artists are Alex Majoli, Arnaud Hendrickx, Feng Li, Giulia Parlato and Donato Di Trapani, Hélène Bellenger, Mandy Barker, Miriam Iervolino, Paolo Ventura, Rima Samman, Rossella Palazzolo and Sergio Zavattieri.