FotoGrafia
Rome’s International Festival - 6th Edition
April 6 – June 3 2007
The Italian Issue - Investigation of contemporary photography
FotoGrafia – Rome’s International Festival is this year celebrating its 6th Edition. Produced by Zoneattive with artistic direction by Marco Delogu, it is sponsored by the Municipality of Rome’s Department of Cultural Policies and under the High Patronage of the President of the Republic.
Exhibitions
The Festival grows continuously and year after year offering an increasing rich and articulated programme. The heart of the festival as always consists in the main exhibitions presented in some of the most suggestive locations of the ‘Museums in the Municipality’ system, such as the Palazzo Braschi Museum of Rome, the Museum of Rome in Trastevere and for the first time the Museum of the Ara Pacis and the Carlo Bilotti Museum, with the addition of the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Hendrick Cristian Andersen Museum, the Sala Santa Rita and Hadrian’s Temple.
To all this, one must add the circuit of exhibitions presented by over one hundred art galleries, among them VM21, LipanjePuntin, Studio Trisorio, Sala1 and foreign cultural institutes, among them the Swiss Institute, the British School of Rome, the Polish Institute, The Academy of Romania, the Goethe Institute and the IILA (Italo- Latino American Institute).
In addition to traditional locations, from the centre to the suburbs, exhibitions are presented in unusual locations such as bookstores, cafés, bars and social centres, places in which new trends and talents are often discovered, such as Spazio Fare, the Odradek, Bibli and Bar à book bookshops.
Events
In addition to many exhibitions FotoGrafia has now added three very important projects: the ‘European Month of Photography’, an international network sponsored by Alcatel Lucent, that the festival is part of alongside 6 other European capital cities, the FotoGrafia- Baume & Mercier First International Award and the creation of ‘Lazio, Terra’, a new project for the Latium Region.
To this one must also add a programme rich in events, portfolio readings, workshops, screenings and meetings that this year will be based on the idea of carrying out a real census of Italian photography. Appointments that are an important part of FotoGrafia, capable of attracting an increasingly attentive and numerous audience; some of these events will be hosted at the Foresteria, the beautiful location in the park surrounding the Casa del Jazz, of which Zoneattive has recently become the manager.
Web
This is all completed by FotoGrafia on line with a series of increasingly important opportunities and openings to the world of the web. Addressed in particular to communities such as myspace.com, where the festival has its own site for promotion and sharing and above all Flickr.com, the largest online community in the world for photographers, within which the Festival sponsors a competition with “Sguardo Urbano” entitled “Boundaries”, with over a thousand members. Furthermore, the initiative with Repubblica.it, for the 1944 thirtieth anniversary, asks readers to send their photographs and to identify themselves in those already published on the website. The best images will then be exhibited at the Festival.
Subject
This year FotoGrafia has chosen “The Italian Issue” as its main theme. An investigation of contemporary photography in Italy, an in depth reflection so as to valorise an extraordinary "school" that generation after generation is renewed in new and original forms and styles. Great maestros and young new artists to discover and rediscover an artistic heritage that the Festival wishes to bring to the attention of wider audiences with monographic exhibitions and projects created specifically for this objective.
Trastevere
Among the most awaited events there is the exhibition entitled "E’ il ‘77", curated by Marco Delogu and Giovanna Calvenzi, in which there will be an exclusive collection for this Festival of the images by photographers that witnessed turning points in our society, portraying its contradictory characteristics, between a creative soul, playful and wishing for change and the devastating spreading of unstoppable violence; among the exhibition’s leading photographers, Tano D'Amico, the photographer who is a symbol of that movement. In addition to images by Toni Thorimbert, Cesare Colombo, Gabriele Basilico, Uliano Lucas and Dino Fracchia, there will also be photographs taken by ordinary people, selected from the website Repubblica.it and shown at the same exhibition presented at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere.
There will also be a collective exhibition entitled "Other Worlds", curated by Renata Ferri, presenting new images by a group of photographers, born in Rome or Romans by adoption, who started their artistic careers during the Eighties, exploring other countries, and who then became reference points for Italian photo-journalism. Photographers such as Roberto Koch, Fabio Ponzio, Angelo R. Turetta and more recently Francesco Zizola, Riccardo Venturi and Paolo Pellegrin. To this group of well-known artists the exhibition will also add work by three young photographers who have in some way inherited their legacy: Lorenzo Castore, Massimo Berruti and Davide Monteleone. Berruti and Monteleone won this year the World Press Photo Award, that will as always be hosted during the month of May by the Museum of Rome in Trastevere. Paolo Pellegrin is present at the Festival for the first time also as the curator of the exhibition of work by Paolo Woods, also held at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere.
Still in Trastevere, at the EX GIL,(Casa della Gioventù Italiana Littoria), a jewel of rationalist architecture created by Luigi Moretti and never before used for an exhibition space, FotoGrafia presents the exhibition entitled ‘Not all roads lead to Rome’, consisting in works commissioned to Xavier Ribas, Raphael Dallaporta, Guy Tillim and the Italians Luca Campigotto, Giuliano Matteucci, Angelo Antolino and Luca Nostri. The result is a reconnaissance of all the territory of Latium: 7 different perspectives of its history and the landscape changes in the most suggestive and unusual locations, situated in both the countryside and on the seashore. This exhibition will be a preview for the Festival (opens on March 16th) and is the first project created with the "Lazio Terra" brand name, created by Zoneattive for the Latium Region with the objective of promoting projects linked to image and photography.
Centre
For this edition too the splendid setting of Hadrian’s Temple is confirmed as a multifunctional location for the Festival, hosting on May 16th the prize-giving ceremony for the first FotoGrafia - Baume & Mercier International Award, for all professional photographers. The creation of this award is the result of interest shown by Baume & Mercier for the world of photography and an awareness of the importance of being linked to one of the most important Festivals in Europe, sharing ideas of proximity, authenticity and creativity. The Award consists in the winning photographer being commissioned to create the project presented and also in the production of an exhibition for the next edition of FotoGrafia, with a monographic catalogue. Yet another step forward on the path to the promotion and development of photography at an international level, which has always been the Festival’s priority.
Also at Hadrian’s Temple, thanks to partnership with Rome’s Chamber of Commerce, there will be an exhibition of the work dedicated to the Capital that each year the Festival commissions toan internationally known photographer. After Josef Koudelka, Olivo Barbieri, Anders Petersen and Martin Parr it is the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide who interprets a hidden and amazingly suggestive Rome. Homage to the city paid by one of the world’s most important photographers, to whom in September 2007 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles will dedicate a great exhibition, and whose publishing house Phaidon recently published a book of retrospective work.
Rome’s Chamber of Commerce becomes an important partner of FotoGrafia, contributing to develop this project on Rome’s contemporary image, which is a part of a wide promotion of the city that the institution has developed during these years.
A new production of work by Antonio Biasiucci, curated by Giuseppe Prode and dedicated to Exvoto will be presented at the prestigious location of the Ara Pacis Museum. This is a new stage in the photographer’s "from Genesis to Catharsis". In this beautiful location designed by Richard Meyer, there will also be an exhibition entitled "Inheriting landscapes", by Maddalena D’Alfonso and Giovanna Calvenzi, in which for the very first time seven great photographers who have contributed to the redefinition of criteria for research in the aesthetics of landscapes, compare their work with that of their possible "heirs". And so Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Vincenzo Castella, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Guido Guidi, Mimmo Jodice and Massimo Vitali have invited two young photographers each to exhibit their work with them.
At the Sala Santa Rita the Festival will instead present work by Giorgia Fiorio entitled ‘Figures’, a selection of images from an ongoing project, “the Gift”, a study on humankind’s spiritual inheritance, on which the artist has been working since the year 2000. The exhibition presents 14 imaginary landscapes or different interpretations of landscapes that are symbolic in collective imagination: places that really exist or miniature landscapes, created to make their viewing easier, or views that give one only an abstract idea of a landscape, that of the soul.
Villa Borghese
In the heart of the exhibition space in the Villa Borghese, FotoGrafia addresses international reality with an exhibition entitled "Mutations 1", who presents the final works of the first edition of the Alcatel Lucent Award for ‘The European Month of Photography’: Philippe Ramette, Beate Gutschow, Marek Kvetan, Nina Dich, AES+F, Elisabeth & Carine Krecke' and Italian Eva Frapiccini, for a preview look at new European photography. This exhibition, sponsored by Alcatel Lucent and presented with great success in other capital cities will be held at the Carlo Bilotti Museum.
Alcatel Lucent, renews his promotional and mecenate position on European photography and for the second year is confirmed as a partner of FotoGrafia Festival.
At the National Gallery of Modern Art, FotoGrafia presents two other important productions, both curated by Giovanna Calvenzi:“20.12.53-10.08-04”is the title of the exhibition of work by Moira Ricci, a young thirty year old artist who mainly works using videos and photography to portray the world of family feelings, “intruding” in antique images. “A journey of remembrance” instead is the title of new work by Paolo Ventura dedicated to Italian cities in the Fifties. As in her previous work, “In wartime”, exhibited last year at the Rencontres Internationales de la photographie in Arles, it is dedicated to the crude and intense scenarios of the world at war, and Ventura’s images are the result of meticulous preparation and each one represents an invented but plausible memory.
The Andersen Museum instead will host for the very first time a selection from the important collection of historical photographs belonging to the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l'Arte Foundation, with about 2500 images almost all never exhibited previously. The exhibition, curated by Francesca Bonetti for the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica and by Filippo Maggia, presents over 100 photographs, dated from 1850 to the first decades of the 20th Century, from the leading patrons of the Club at the Café Greco to the pictorialists from the Turin area.
This year too will be a unique event for international photography with over 100 exhibitions and two months filled with events making Rome a stable reference point in the calendar of great festivals for this sector.
FotoGrafia
Rome’s International Festival
6th Edition / April 6th – June 3rd 2007
www.fotografiafestival.it
