Sguardi Plurali
Project Room | 16 December 2021 - 30 January 2022
The exhibition has been extended until January 30, 2022.
On Thursday 16 December, the new exhibition Sguardi Plurali (‘Plural Gazes’) opens to the public in the Project Room of CAMERA. The exhibition is rooted the collaboration between CAMERA, FIERI – Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull’Immigrazione and Società Umanitaria with the aim of narrating the complexity and cultural richness that characterise our present. The show features 45 photos emerging from the enthusiastic participation in the photography competition ‘Sguardi Plurali’ aimed at young photographers on the themes of migration and the second generations.
The exhibition is the result of a call to which 19 photographers responded. The stories of each of them are different: some are asylum seekers and refugees, others are Italian citizens or waiting to become ones. Photography also fulfils different purposes and projects in their lives: a means of social denunciation, an instrument through which to carry out an intimate research into their own identity, or a form of expression chosen as part of a more or less established artistic path.
On show are the projects presented by Oleksandra Horobets (Ukraine, 1997), Karim El Maktafi (Desenzano del Garda, 1992) and Danielle Souza da Silva (Fortaleza, Brazil, 1997), winners of the first, second and third prizes respectively, as well as a shot for each of the participants in the competition, providing a kaleidoscope of stories and evocations capable of conveying the many facets of this society.
What emerges significantly from these works is the need to bear witness to a personal experience, which however takes on a collective connotation thanks to the narrative power of the photographic image. In Kolobok, Oleksandra Horobets recounts the painful long-distance relationship with her mother through the filter of a Ukrainian folk tale. In the images she uses, archive material and constructed photography are mixed in an alternation of various planes and times that together present a moving search for her own roots.
Moroccan-Italian photographer Karim El Maktafi examines the situation of boys and girls born and raised in Italy yet without being fully recognised as citizens. Built with a typically documentary approach, They Call Us Second Generation conveys the air of suspension of those who, like him, are forced to hover between the sense of belonging to a place and the gaze of those who still consider them foreigners.
For Danielle Souza da Silva too, her own personal experience becomes the stimulus for the construction of a Diario di bordo (‘Logbook’), where words and photographs form a network of cities, people, memories and evocations. A collection of intimate and delicate fragments, in which places become ports of call in a continuous exploration of the world.
The winners of the competition exhibited at CAMERA were selected by a jury composed of: Pietro Cingolani (anthropologist, University of Bologna and FIERI), Monica Poggi (CAMERA curator, Turin), Annalisa Frisina (visual sociologist, University of Padua), Mariagiulia Grassilli (anthropologist, University of Bologna and director of the Human Rights Nights Festival), Délio Jasse (photographer and video artist) and Suranga Deshapriya Katugampala (photographer and video artist).
The exhibition, previously presented in Carbonia last October as part of the How to Film the World event promoted by the Carbonia Film Festival, will subsequently be shown in Bologna and Milan in early 2022.