Artist
Irene Zottola
Irene Zottola is a self-taught photographer; in 2016, she began honing her skills in the laboratory of Madrid’s Slow Photo collective. Her poetic works probe at the limits of analogue photography, which she often pairs with text. Working simultaneously as an arts educator, Zottola explores photography as a tool for social intervention amongst vulnerable groups. Her first photobook, Icarus, was published by Ediciones Anómalas in 2021. With the same project, Zottola was a finalist at PhotoEspaña, and at the Photobook Awards of Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2022. Her work has been exhibited in Spain, Italy and Morocco.
Ícaro
In order to escape from the labyrinth in which they had been imprisoned, Daedalus made a pair of wings for himself and his son Icarus. Flying would make them free. In his enthusiasm after taking flight, Icarus got too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax that held the feathers on his back; he ended up falling into the sea and drowning. Over the course of history, a liaison has been forged between human beings and the sky; between the desire to fly and the physical and symbolic meaning it entails. As a result, the notion of flight brings together contrary and complementary elements: the eternal and the ascending as opposed to the perishable and the descending; the hope and the distress in the act of learning to fly; the rising from or plunging to the ground; life and death. Despair and fatigue contrast sharply with the desire to take flight. Birds are symbols of thought, of the imagination and connections with the spirit. Wings and feathers express an elevation to the sublime, signalling liberation and victory. They are worn by heroes. Our desire to fly responds to our need to move from one place to another, although we very often plunge into an abyss, as Icarus did. To become airborne – that's where the poetry lies.
Similarly, the five contemporary photographers PHotoESPAÑA is nominating for FUTURES this year are developing work that stands out on today’s scene, offering five different yet complementary perspectives that provide an overview of contemporary practices, ranging from documentary (Umberto Diecinove) to a type of expanded photography that incorporates performance (Monica Egido), to work with the photobook format (Irene Zottola) and conceptual photography (Laura San Segundo and Rita Puig-Serra Costa). In 2022, PHotoESPAÑA closely tracked these artists’ progress.
In her project Ícaro, published as a photo book in 2022, Irene Zottola uses photography to offer a mystical fable as a metaphor of the contemporary world. In FOMO, also from 2022, Mónica Egido uses a performative duel to represent the need to stop and observe ourselves silently for an extended period of time. In The Circular Enclosure, a project currently underway and started in 2023, Laura San Segundo resolves a succession of landscapes as mental sites where the dialogue takes place between photography and the subconscious and is capable of transcending the inherent meaning of an image or element. In Anatomy of an Oyster, started in 2018 and still underway, Rita Puig-Serra Costa uses the photographic image to formulate a first-person journey into the past, in an attempt to tell a story of violence and abuse silenced by time. Finally, in the ongoing project INSCTS, Umberto Dicienove sets out to document the potential change we can achieve with insects, providing a global view with a special focus on people working on this change and those who will benefit from it.
Mónica Egido and Umberto Diecinove developed their projects as part of our MA in photography and artistic projects – the festival’s training programme. Laura San Segundo and Rita Puig-Serra Costa stood out within the set of projects submitted to the Discoveries viewing programme. And the Irene Zóttola’s photobook Ícaro was chosen for the 2022 PHotoESPAÑA award for Best Photography Book of the Year.