Grenze-Arsenali Fotografici Festival 2025

We like to think that a Festival can generate a community, one that is permanent and recognizable. To give, to participate become the conditions that make Grenze a way of inhabiting circumstances, inventing a pathway of escape that can be traveled by all.

Overview

"Anfällig," frail, vulnerable, fragile—liable to fall or relapse at any moment. We are not fully healed, but we return to the world with a newfound delicacy. "Frail," from the Latin causionabilis, "that which can be caused." We are weakened by uncertainties, influenced, and easily swayed by doubt. Precarious, always teetering on the edge of balance. It is hard to face challenges with stability, strength, or resolve. In apparent security, we remain threatened and unable to resist. The concept of Grenze 2025 invites us to explore the inherent weakness in things, people, and everyday situations. It seeks to interpret how fragility manifests, blurring the boundary between life and its instability. "Frail" thus becomes an unadorned exposure to the beauty within weakness, without concealing the suffering or uncertainty it entails. Photography becomes a tool to transform fragility into an essential and inevitable part of our humanity. Vulnerability lies in the detail over the whole, in the perishable object, in imperfection and decay. Vulnerable is the precarious contamination between the natural and the artificial, in time etching the routine of the seasons, and within them, our asymmetric presence: in imperfection, disharmony, and instability. Fragility moves along inclined angles, between resignation and hope, through distorted perspectives. For those who are frail know, in their exposed skin, that the world is on the verge of disintegration and decline.

For the 2025 edition, the artistic directors, Simone Azzoni and Francesca Marra, are joined in the curatorship by Erik Kessels.

The main exhibition, following Wim Wenders' in 2024, is once again that of a director: Pedro Almodóvar.

Other Exhibited artists: Katarina Marković, Dario Mitidieri, Alfio Tommasini, Nuno Alexandre Serrão, Frédérique Dimarco, Tianyu Wang, Florine Thiebaud, Emanuela Cherchi.

The festival, now in its eighth edition, offers a variety of events: workshops, portfolio reviews, children's workshops, book presentations, screenings, and meetings with the artists.