Fotografia Europea Festival – Photography takes over Reggio Emilia

Taking a walk in Reggio Emilia to visit the Fotografia Europea festival is like wandering around unknown worlds, and exploring one hundred stories. Several exhibitions take place all around the city and the chosen theme for the 2013 edition is Change. Photography and responsibility.

Philippe Chancel’s work reveals what happens after a war, an eartquake or a tsunami: the slow changes in places such as Kabul, Fukushima and Port-au-Prince. His photographs show us something very different from the obvious “as seen in tv”: the everyday life, exactly as it is.

Philippe Chancel, DPRK 2, 2012, Edition de 5 Inkjet print, pure pigment, 120 x 160 cm, Courtesy of the artist, Eric Franck Fine Art, London

The wonder-house of Anna and Eve by Viktoria Sorochinski is a narrative project about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. For years, the artist has been recording the everyday life of Anna, a young russian woman living in Canada with her little daughter Eve. Even if the photographs are something between fantasy and reality, their relationship is true and intense, and so are the moments Sorochinski captured with her camera.

Viktoria Sorochinski, Exchanging Wisdom, Montreal 2006 © Viktoria Sorochinski

Tim Parchikov’s exhibition takes place in the Parmeggiani Gallery, a museum that houses a collection of nineteenth-century copies and fakes. It’s the perfect space for Parchikov’s Times New Roman; this work is a reportage about new elites in Russia, or rather the kitschy neoclassical art copies that show off their status.

Tim Parchikov, Times New Roman. Moskow 1, Mosca 2010 © Tim Parchikov

Cristina de Middel documents the great dream of professor Edward Makuka Nkoloso and his Zambian Space Program, compiled in 1964. Nkoloso never reached the planet Mars, as the Zambian government could not afford or even understand his weird space research.
The Afronauts is not the story of a real change, it is rather supposing how this story could look, what could happen if continent Africa really had a role in the international space race.

Cristina De Middel, From the Afronauts series, Spain, 2011, Archival inkjet print, 30×30 cm © Cristina De Middel

Obviously, these words cannot cover  all the artists exhibited in Reggio Emilia; I didn’t mention the interesting works of Lucia Ganieva, Sergey Shestakov, Rinko Kawauchi,  and many others. I didn’t mention the OFF section of the festival and all the emerging photographers works.
These words are a simple call to take a walk in Reggio Emilia and look at the world with someone else’s eyes.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from the series of “Illuminance”, 2009, 100×100 cm, C-Print © Rinko Kawauchi

VV.AA., Fotografia Europea Festival, Reggio Emilia, through June 16, 2013