Artist
Alessia Rollo
Alessia Rollo is born in South Italy in 1982. She received her BA at University in Perugia and she is crossing her MA in Publishing at University Statale in Milan.
She also obtained a Master in “Creative Photography” in 2009 at EFTI school in Madrid and participated to many workshops with international artist as Peter Funch, Mauricio Alejo, Danis Darzacq, Jill Greenberg, Matt Siber, James Casebere, Mary Hellen Mark.
She uses photography since 2009 and her project investigates often the relationship between objects, human habits and society, by using and mix up different photographic languages and category (as setup pictures, landscape, reportage, portrait and still life, etc.)
She participated in solo and group exhibitions in Spain, Italy and Brazil.
Her work has been displayed in Mia Photo Fair Milano, Urban Layers Triennale di Milano; Set up Bologna, Galleria Bluorg Bari; Bitume Photofest Malaga, Salonicco and Lecce: Milano, Biennale of Young Mediterranean artists; Galleria ARTcore Gallery Bari: Museum of history of Lecce; “Si fest off” Savignano: Galeria Mascate, Brasil; Galeria Cero Madrid; “Shangai Photofestival”, Shangai.
She was selected for the international art residency Default – Masterclass in residence in 2011, for a residency at the MO.ta in Ljubljana in 2013, for the Biennale of Young Artists of the Mediterranean in 2015 and for “Bitume Photofest” in 2016 (Malaga, Thessaloniki, Lecce).
Her project Fata Morgana has been selected in the finalist group for LensCulture Exposure Award 2018 and exhibited during Photo London 2018.
Fata Morgana
Fata Morgana is the name of a complex mirage that distorts objects and then fades very quickly. The Fata Morgana is visible from the region I belong in the southern part of Italy, Salento, and it gives the illusion to see Albanian mountains from the Adriatic Sea: but to me it represents a powerful metaphor of our contemporary geopolitical situation.
Salento, like all of Europe, has recently become a false place of wonder and hope for people who are fleeing from Africa or Meddle East: but the pictures taken by photo-reporters and showed on newspapers often reduce migrants lives and histories to few and common stereotypes.
As well in the last years the visual identity of Apulia region and Salento, that is as part of this territory, has be flatted by a touristic marketing that creates and promotes stereotypes and deletes diversities and contrasts.
This project represents my willingness to create a visual complexity around topics so relevant in the contemporary European scenario but as well to think about the role of photographers, which are powerful promoters of meanings, ideas and opinions.
During the next 3 years I’ve worked on different issues connected with the past and the recent history of Salento, a land of transition since centuries, trying to offering a new conception of them, telling a story from the South of the Mediterranean, so often just an object of observation and not the protagonist of the contemporary tale.
Fata Morgana includes very different style and gender: portraits of foreign people who live and work in a legal or illegal way in my region, documentary pictures of the landscape, stage photography, still life etc.
This project is a storytelling in between realty and fiction, a way to underline the impossibility of represent and define.