SCAN Tarragona Festival 2024

SCAN Tarragona is an international photography festival organized by the City Council of Tarragona with the complicity of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Overview

The festival also has the invaluable collaboration of the Provincial Council of Tarragona, the Port of Tarragona, the University Rovira i Virgili (URV) and a wide network of institutions and local public and private entities.

The first two editions took place in 2008 and 2009 under the direction of Mariona Fernández and the accompaniment of a large group of experts. The aim was to offer a space for thought and creation around the most emerging photography and, in this sense, activities such as the Talent Latent exhibition, which was established within the festival as a preferential program to disseminate the work of younger artists, as well as the II Jornades Catalanes de Fotografia and the symposium Instantànies de la Teoria de la Fotografia, became relevant in those early years.

In 2010, SCAN became a biennial. The Forvm Foundation, with David Balsells and Chantal Grande at the helm, took over the direction and Josep Rigol the general coordination. Talent Latent was consolidated and in 2012 the first Full Contact professional meeting between emerging artists and art world agents was held. Both programs would become the main pillars on which SCAN would be sustained until 2018. In the last edition of 2020, Chantal Grande and Jesús Vilamajó were in charge of curating the SCAN Review: a reduced version adapted to the reality of COVID-19.

If SCAN stubbornly pushes photography and the hybridization of this with other disciplines, with the aim of exploring new forms of expression in a field that is unattainable and infinite, that of art; photographers and public are peremptorily invoked to encourage and welcome a visual culture that perpetuates itself, above all, as a plural space open to everyone from where both the most transgressive imagination and critical reflection are stimulated.