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Martina Zanin

Nominated in

2025

CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia

Lives and Works in

Milan, Italy

Martina Zanin (b. 1994, San Daniele del Friuli) is a visual artist based in Milan. Her practice moves seamlessly between photography, writing, collage, leatherwork, installation, sculpture, and artist books. Zanin is the author of the photobook I Made Them Run Away, published by Skinnerboox, and Older Than Love, a self-published artist book. In 2024 she is a finalist for the Talent Prize Inside Art. She is the winner of Premio Driving Energy 2023 and is among the recipients of Giovane Fotografia Italiana 2021 and Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, promoted by MAECI and MiC. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at national and international level, including GNAM - National Museum of Modern Art, Rome (2024), IIC Toronto (2024), Cassina Projects, Milan (2024), Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2023), Foto Forum, Bozen (2023), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome (2023), Benaki Museum, Athens (2022), IIC Abu Dhabi (2021), FMAV - Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2021), galleria studiofaganel, Gorizia (2021), Fotografia Europea (2021), Goethe Institute, Rome (2017). Her works are part of public collections such as MoMA Library New York, Haas Library Yale University, MEP - Maison Européenne de la Photographie Paris, FMAV - Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, and Fondazione Orestiadi.

Projects

2025

Please, don't ever come down

“There are human beings, such as my father, who are as untamable as hawks. And, just as hawks, see others as prey to attack, without being able to form relationships. Loners. Individuals who hurt other people who are more like rabbits or hares.” In "Please, don’t ever come down", Zanin draws from a complex personal experience to explore the father-daughter relationship, using the metaphor of the hawk and its prey. The artist puts into question the ambiguity of power dynamics, psychological violence, and patriarchal structures within the family sphere, while also exploring the intersections between human and animal. Evocative photographs of objects, gestures, animals, actions, and body parts intertwine with family archive images and texts from “avvistamenti”, a diary where Zanin records the date and time of falcon sightings, communicating with F (Father and Falcon), a hybrid human-animal creature. The falcon, a creature that instills both terror and fascination, appears and disappears at its own will, impossible to tame. The artist reflects on how abandonment can also be a form of asserting power, leaving the prey as a victim of this presence-absence that haunts it, much like the familial baggage we carry, the patterns and dynamics that are difficult to break free from. Please, don’t ever come down is a poetic reflection on legacies, evolution, and metamorphosis, that delves into blood, familial bonds, and dreamlike, imaginary connections. It is an invitation to enter vulnerable spaces in search of new perspectives.

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2021

Older Than Love

"Intra-specific aggression is much older (millions of years) than personal friendship and love. There is intra-specific aggression without its opposite, love. But, on the contrary, there is no love without aggression.” (Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression) "Older Than Love" is a multimedia installation consisting of photographs, archive material, video, and sound. It starts with the artist’s personal relationship with her father and develops it using the metaphor of a hawk with its prey, creating a parallel between animal and human aggression. The work tackles the theme of violence and the sub-themes associated with it, such as fear, anger, and love, emphasizing the fact that in every relationship that involves a bond of attachment, there is still an inherent element of aggression. The work blends photographs taken by the artist with the photos found in family albums that represent family and personal memory, superimposing the male figure over that of the falcon. With this, the video loop is edited in such a way that it is loaded with tension, alternating the falcon’s point of view with that of the prey, up to its capture. On the other hand, the soundtrack is a collage of recordings of different male voices, which repeats sentences from everyday life in a violent, cold, and detached tone. "Older Than Love" highlights how seemingly normal behaviors can be interpreted negatively and, vice versa, how negative behaviors can be normalized within relationships, prompting the spectator to reflect on the nature of aggression and how it might be forged by the social, environmental, and family context. The details and fragments of images, sounds, and videos created by the artist, somewhere between the poetic and scientific, the personal and public, strive to involve the viewers on a sensory level, urging them to reflect on the underlying question: what is aggression, an instinct or a learned behavior?

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2020

I Made Them Run Away

‘It was summer and as many children did, I spent my days in a summer camp. One night I was very excited when I came home and after having had dinner with my grandmother I went upstairs, where my mother and I lived, with the intention of going to sleep. As I entered, I saw my mother and a man sitting on the couch watching television. My mother asked me how my day had been and I couldn’t stop myself from showing both of them what I had learned. I started dancing and singing in front of the television for about 10 minutes, until the man interrupted my performance by saying “It’s late, I’d better go.”, followed by my mother’s glare towards me. Having said goodbye to the man, my mother came back in the house yelling at me: “How is it possible that you make them all run away?”.’ I Made Them Run Away is a multi-layered story weaving together archival family photographs and contemporary imagery with texts written by the artist’s mother. Shifting between the different points of view, Zanin retraces the recurring complicated triangle relationship between her, her mother, and the “man”, a not-constant multiple figure, mostly invisible in the work. Fantasizing about a man she was never able to have, the artist’s mother wrote her thoughts and desires to an imaginary man in a diary entitled Letters to a Man I Have Never Had. The poetical and wistful writing clash with the torn family images, of which her mother has preserved only her figure, or that of her daughter, tearing off all her ex-boyfriends, and creating objects saturated with anger and loneliness. Captured by the artist are objects, gestures, animals, body parts, and idyllic visions, symbolic images reconstructing feelings and sensations that emerged from the past. The interplay of perspectives created a dialogue between mother and daughter in two different moments in time, a reflection on the role of the past in the present, and an exploration of the coexistence and transition of opposite feelings within family ties and love relationships, such as compassion and anger, attraction and repulsion.

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Martina Zanin

was nominated by

CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia

2025

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Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.

The five artists selected for FUTURES are Claudia Amatruda (Foggia, 1995), Matteo Buonomo (Milan, 1991), Benedetta Casagrande (Milan, 1993), Alessio Pellicoro (Taranto, 1994) and Martina Zanin (San Daniele del Friuli, 1994). This selection consolidates the nature of this program as an observatory of the medium, developing a broad perspective of its practices today in the Italian context and examining the ways in which the digital and new aesthetics are changing its fruition. It includes refined operations that present both research with a return to its function as a document, as well as experiments that question the medium's ideas of form, truth, and identity. The aim is to show how photography is a medium in perpetual transformation and expansion, which brings together experiences of a documentary nature on social and cultural themes, and others that emphasize formal and conceptual research.

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Amatruda reflects on the transformations of his own body due to a rare degenerative disease. Looking at Donna Haraway's theories on the union between cyborgs and humans, she transforms her body into a theatre of reception for external elements, highlighting possible contaminations and metamorphoses through self-portraiture.

‍Bonomo's work focuses on long-term projects focusing on the social context trying to read the dynamics of loneliness and sharing that run through contemporary society. His photographic stories are enriched by textual and investigative insights.

‍Casagrande uses the medium of photography to be in relationship with the surrounding environment and its elements. She analyses ecological coexistence with the non-human living world and explores the ways in which we relate to them: intraspecific coexistence and the possibility of constructing new forms of kinship and intimacy between species in a context of unprecedented loss of variety of living organisms.

The elements that characterize Pellicoro's research are the ambiguous relationship with reality, the role of immobility and movement, the post photographic inclination and the testimonial approach. A result that, on the one hand, is due to the subjects filmed; on the other, to the interest in representing unconscious drives or autobiographical issues.

‍Zanin's research is intertwined with his personal experiences and draws on references from literature and psychoanalysis to interrogate the notions of absence, memory, aggression, repetition, patriarchy, and heritage. She invites the viewer to reflect on the ambiguity of power dynamics, focusing on the fine line between protection and control and turning her attention to vulnerable positions.

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List of curators

Giangavino Pazzola – Curator of contemporary and research programs at CAMERA

Walter Guadagnini – Director at CAMERA

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Nominators

Arianna Catania | Director of Gibellina Photoroad / Open Air & Site-specific Festival

Matteo Balduzzi | Curator of MUFOCO – Museum of Contemporary Photography of Milano-Cinisello Balsamo

Marco Delogu | Photographer and President of Azienda Speciale Palaexpo - Rome

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