The artists nominated by
CAMERA Italian Centre for Photography is a cultural foundation located in Turin and completely dedicated to photography. Positioned in the city center, very close to
the Mole Antonelliana, the Po River and the Museo Egizio, it is firstly an exhibition space of almost 2000m2 for Italian and international photography and visual culture. The 2021 exhibition programme has been organised according to two main fields of research: established artists and historical shows have been hosted in the main spaces, while mid-career and young talents ideas and exhibitions in our project room.
At the same time, CAMERA operates in the educational field with workshops, summer schools, talks and activities addressed to different audiences interested in photography. Another important field of research is related to private and public photography archives, who are in the middle of our attention through conservation and valorisation practices. Started from the autumn of 2015, CAMERA is a platform for display, production, archiving, training, meeting, and debate all around photography.
Related to the criteria for the selection of our 2021 artists included in the Futures programme, we decided to adopt an inclusive approach to mainly represent the greatest number of possibilities and variations of photography practice today. The starting point in this situation has been practical: what does photography mean today in the Italian context? How can we disseminate new trends, aesthetics, and topics to Italian cultural scenario?
From the linguistic point of view, our selection ranges from an approach deeply grounded in investigating social and cultural issues through a register of reporting matrix to another more characterised by a performative influence. In this way, we underline how they often mix different typologies of sources: not only digital and analogical own made materials, but also scientifical, manipulated, archival, downloaded images and so on are used to build new narratives about the contemporary.
At the same time, with their project, our talents can question the role of photography today and the perception (and modification) of society through it. Mixing bidimensional images with videos, installations, projections, books, and written texts they offer a complex and multifaceted world in which different interpretations take shape.
From the thematic point of view, our talents investigate a kind of aesthetic of trauma and catastrophes focusing their attention and sensibility on issues related to the main challenges in contemporary times: ecology and disasters, social and personal interactions, inequalities and decolonisation, our relationship with history and fictional aspects. More than a self-referential and formal dissertation about technique and forms in photographic field, their projects and research seem to be part of a kind of huge collective discourse about self-determination and emancipation in which they take active part lighting up some corner with their point of view.
Text by Giangavino Pazzola
- Curator
Giulia Parlato (b.1993) is an Italian visual artist based in London and Palermo.
She graduated from the BA (Hons) Photography at London College of Communication in 2016 and from the MA Photography at the Royal College of Arts in 2019.
Her practice delves into histories, myths and cultural heritage, involving photography and video. She analyses the historical use of photography as a document of truth, specifically in its scientific and forensic uses, and challenges this language, by creating a new space in which staged scenes take place. The melancholic and frustrating state, caused by humans’ impossibility to understand the past constitutes the foundation of her work.
Giulia’s work is shown nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions including Podbielski Contemporary Gallery (Milan, 2021), Photo London Fair (London, 2020), Photo Fringe (Brighton, 2020), Palazzo Rasponi 2 (Ravenna, 2020), Galleria Cavour for Photo Open Up (Padova, 2020), Gare Du Nord for Paris Photo (Paris 2019), Kunstgebaude for Soft Power Palace Festival (Stuttgart, 2018); and featured extensively in printed and online publications. She is the recipient of the BJP International Photography Award (2021), the Innovate Grant (2020), Camera Work Award (2020) and the Carte Blanche Éstudiants Award (2019).
Talks and Commissions include Paris Photo, The Photographers' Gallery, Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts, and Art Licks.
She is a founder member of Ardesia Projects, a curatorial platform dedicated to contemporary photography, and of the Carte Blanche Collective.
Giulia's work is held in public and private collections.
Eleonora Agostini (b. 1991) is an Italian artist that lives and works in London. She studied photography at Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan and she received her MA from the Royal College of Art Photography programme in 2018.
Her work has been shown internationally and was featured in multiple printed and online publications. She was one of the artists selected to be part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019 and was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2021.
Her work A Blurry Aftertaste is part of the Government Art Collection and it was published as a book form as part of Paper Journal Annual 2019. In the last few years Eleonora has exhibited in galleries and museums such as L21 Gallery in Palma de Mallorca, South London Gallery and Borough Road Gallery in London, Leeds Art Gallery in Leeds, MAR Ravenna, National Museum of Gdansk, and festivals such as Circulations Festival in Paris and Format Festival in Derby.
She works editorially with The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Port Magazine, among others.
Agostini uses photography, video, performance and sculpture to tell stories that raise questions about the construction of personal identities and behaviours. Her work is strongly connected with the experience of our surroundings and she is interested in exploring how the relationships that we form inform who we are.
Through the study of preconceived structures, whether physical or psychological, Agostini aims to investigate the difficulties of how human experience is constructed and she is interested in finding a possible fracture within our socially constructed rules and the spaces we inhabit. Her work often starts from personal experiences and
it is the result of a long process of internalization of memories and experiences that she re-elaborate and recontextualize to give it order and gain control over them. She is interested in the psychological action of reenactment used as a tool to investigate and gain insight into one’s life: re-enacting and re-imagining old memories and past experiences become a way to unfold and observe our personal histories.
Agostini refers to the every-day as a space full of potential and possibilities for quests, incorporating ordinary objects and activities within her images to express and navigate its different layers and meanings.
Matteo de Mayda is a Venice-based photographer represented by Contrasto, focused on reportage and social and environmental causes.
His pictures appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, British Journal of Photography, Internazionale, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times Weekend, Vogue and Vice.
He participated in several exhibitions, including at United Nations (Geneva, Switzerland, 2013) at Venice Biennale of Architecture (Venice, Italy, 2016) and Head On Photo Festival (Sidney, Australia, 2020).
In 2019 he published “Era Mare”, a book about the high water in Venice, whose proceeds went totally to the shopkeepers who needed help.
For his work about Covid-19 Matteo won the REFOCUS award by Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (Italy) and according to ARTRIBUNE he’s the Best Italian young photographer of 2020.
Leonardo Magrelli (1989) lives and works in Rome. After studying Design first and Art History later, he began working as a graphic and book designer.
A certain openness to manipulation and reuse of images, inherent in the graphic design work, as well as a particular attention to project and research, rather than instinctuality alone, are characteristics that remain visible in the author's practice even after converting to photography. The awareness of images’ hybrid and ambiguous nature is in fact a constant subtext of his work, which varies from time to time between a more conceptual approach to photography and a more descriptive and documentary one, often mixing the two. Alongside his personal research, he collaborates with the collective Vaste Programme, founded with Giulia Vigna and Alessandro Tini in 2017, to experiment with post-photography, installations and new media.
Silvia Rosi is an artist from Scandiano, living and working between London and Modena. She graduated from London College of Communication in 2016 with a BA (Hons) in Photography.
Her work retraces her personal family history drawing on her Togolaise heritage, and the idea of origins. The theme of family is explored through self-portraits in which she plays her mother and father, narrating their experience of migration from Togo to Italy. Her images are partially informed by the West African studio portrait tradition.
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