Fotografia Europea, the international photography festival comprising 20 exhibitions and a calendar of related events, has opened in Reggio Emilia, Italy. This year’s event takes the theme ‘ghosts of the moment’ – an invitation to ‘seek out the unseen and the invisible, to pay attention to the whispers of what has been and what could be, revealing the silent stories that inform and guide our present’.
Giulia Vanelli’s The Season
Giulia Vanelli’s project The Season is an emotional journey through memories intertwined with the author’s summers. The work explores the idea that rather than a closed dimension, the past can be considered an active presence that continues to resurface in the present, influencing the way we experience time and how we develop our identity.
A Series of Dreams: Visual Landscapes and Soundscapes
This series aims to explore connections between photography and music, organised into a three-part exhibition. Beyond Those Mountains, The Sea is conceived as a space for experimentation and research on the relationship between landscape and soundscape, created for the exhibition by the Italian singer-songwriter and composer Iosonouncane.
Bravo by Felipe Romero Beltrán
Bravo is set in Rio Bravo, a site of perpetual tension and migration where identity and geography intersect. Romero Beltrán’s series constructs an elusive visual narrative in which the river becomes a silent protagonist, shaping the lives of those who approach it but rarely appearing in the frame. Through stark portraits, austere interiors and scarred landscapes, Bravo captures the suspended time of migration.
Subject Studies by Tania Franco Klein
This series investigates how identity and bias shape perception. Tania Franco Klein photographed 106 subjects of varying ages and ethnicities in identical settings, including a diner, bathroom, car and living room, with consistent lighting, composition and poses. This interactive anthropological project challenges viewers to confront their assumptions, asking: why do we have different emotional responses to each image when the context remains the same?
Automated Refusal by Salvatore Vitale
Salvatore Vitale explores the fragile realities of gig work, where surveillance, rankings and long hours blur the boundaries between life and labour. The film questions how technology reshapes the relationship between people and their environments in the digital age. Blending observation and fiction, the work examines how automation transforms not only work but also identity and social connection.
Le Jardin d’Hannibal by Marine Lanier
Le Jardin d’Hannibal is set in the Lautaret Garden, the highest alpine botanical garden in Europe. It is home to more than 2,000 plant species and functions as a conservatory of alpine flora. During the spring of 2019, Marine Lanier spent extended periods living in the garden’s Mirande laboratory chalet with ecologists, botanists and gardeners. As the snow melted, alpine plants from across the globe gradually reappeared among meadows and rocks. Lanier’s images form a dreamlike and nocturnal herbarium where plants emerge from winter like the traces of an impossible journey.
The Serpent’s Thread by Emilia Martin
As a child, Emilia Martin spent countless hours observing her beloved grandmother, a Polish countryside textile worker. Her textiles were composed of many fibres, many threads and many hands reaching back through time. Textile-making became her language, carrying the knowledge of generations of women. When Martin’s grandmother died, her works, perceived as having no value, were discarded or lost. Inspired by this missing archive of a life’s work, Martin began tracing other histories of women whose textiles serve as ghosts where records fall silent.
Vestiges of the Future by Frédéric D Oberland
Frédéric D Oberland’s multi-sensory practice sees experimental photography, film and music continually feed one another. His grainy photographs, poetic observational gestures and Super8 film explore fragile temporalities. This work captures the sensation of a close call; the flash where life appears all at once, as a flood of hallucinated visions in a trembling world. A quantum space and time inhabited by ghosts.
Our Hidden Room by Mohamed Hassan
This series tells the fragmented story of a complex yet deeply loving relationship between the artist and a father living with bipolar disorder. During Mohamed Hassan’s childhood in Egypt, his father often behaved erratically and withdrew from the world, becoming increasingly obsessed with a small, dark, hidden room within the family home. This space, both physical and psychological, became a site of solitude, fixation and unspoken struggle.
Ghostland by Carolyn Drake
In our hyper-mediated age, reality increasingly appears as a ‘spectral’ territory; a landscape in which experiences, bodies and events are filtered, translated and recoded through screens. Ghostland explores this intermediate space, where the screen is a real cultural environment, capable of shaping our perceptions and behaviours, designing collective imaginaries.
Finalmente posso andare, Terni, 1999 by Cinzia Laliscia
It is the themes of absence and mourning that run through this project that whisper of a parallel, suspended inner world where goodbyes remain unsaid. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Cinzia Laliscia suffered two family bereavements. The impossibility of saying a final goodbye led her to take refuge in nature and in the landscape of her childhood, wild yet familiar, to compose a visual diary of memory. Here, photography becomes a space for dialogue with those who are no longer here, evoking an intimate dimension where memory and consolation coexist.
Stains and Ashes by Ola Rindal
This project began with a spot on a cloth: an observation. Ola Rindal photographed the spot. Then, he created new spots with ink on paper. He developed the theme with both photos and drawings. After a while, he started incorporating blurred, sometimes nearly abstract portraits. Rindal uses this characteristic to express distance, a sense of not getting closer, not understanding, as if reality is escaping.
Generation/поколение by Theo Cottle
In many Bulgarian towns and villages, winter is punctuated by the ancient Kukeri ritual. Dressed in a range of distinctive costumes, Kukeri run through the houses of locals to usher away evil spirits and encourage positivity and new life. Although the masks and costumes vary broadly, silky kalofer goat hair, shaggy materials and domineering horns and bells are often used, fashioned into towering, formidable proportions.
L’albergo della lontananza by Federica Mambrini
This project unfolds between Italy and Chile and is based on architectural situations that have been studied or created. The generator and catalyst of the project is a long-distance relationship between two people, divided between two distant continents, who try to draw closer by analysing the space that separates them.
Fotografia Europea runs until 14 June, in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
