THE EXHIBITIONS

The 2010 exhibits will be subdivided into the four main areas of tributes, solo exhibits, productions and projects. These will be open to visitors until Sunday 13th June and located at some of the city's most evocative artistic and cultural venues (Cloisters of San Domenico, Parmeggiani Art Gallery, Palazzo Casotti, Spazio Gerra, Sinagogue, Frati Cappuccini Museum, Palazzo della Frumentaria, and Loris Malaguzzi International Center). A new feature of the fifth festival will be the special opening of the Benedictine Cloisters of San Pietro, which has undergone major restructuring works, providing an opportunity for the public to preview one of the city's most impressive late Renaissance architectural complexes.

 Tribute to Man Ray
The highlight of the fifth Fotografia Europea festival will be the tribute to the great Dada and Surrealist photographer Man Ray (Philadelphia 1890 – Paris 1976), produced by the Fondazione Marconi of Milan. The retrospect exhibit covers the artist's entire creative career from the twenties through to the fifties, celebrating the visionary and hypnotic quality of his perspective which had the power to transfigure everything he fixed his eye on, moving freely from one form of expression to another, from painting to creating objects and directing avant-garde films.

  Solo exhibitions
Elio Grazioli has selected four artists for the programme of solo exhibits of Fotografia Europea 2010. They are: Mark Borthwick, for whom this will be the first solo exhibit to be held in Italy, the eclectic English film-maker, musician and photographer especially renowned in the world of fashion photography but an all-rounder artist who launched a new approach to fashion photography thanks to his peculiar poetics consisting of intimate and analogical, often overexposed, shots and constant cross-references between nature, item of clothing, subject and light; Ange Leccia, a French artist who has been working since the eighties in the field of photography and videos as forms of expression through which he explores and challenges the subtle distinction between documentary and amateur video and aesthetic product with delicate and novel effects; Alessandra Spranzi, one of the most brilliant Italian artists who uses the photographic tool for a research project focussing on the most everyday and ordinary situation but with surreal and disturbing overtones, conveying an alternative or altered vision of reality and portraying our wonder when confronted with it; and Richard Wentworth, one of the leading sculptors on the English panorama, engaged since the seventies in producing a photographic work-in-progress of “everyday sculptures”.

On the occasion of Fotografia Europea, Palazzo Magnani and the Province of Reggio Emilia will be presenting an exhibit by Michael Kenna curated by Sandro Parmiggiani. It consists of 290 black and white images in all, of which 200 represent a genuine anthology of his work; 35 are views of our local area taken during several field trips he has made in the past three years; 35 are a record of the eternal charm of Venice; and 20 reintroduce one of Kenna's historical series dealing with the Nazi concentration-extermination camps. The photographs will enchant the viewer for the alternation of silent drama and marvel that he is able to encapsulate within them: Kenna is not interested in describing places accurately but in capturing everything that might arouse the viewers' imagination and leading them into a reverie.

 The productions
Following a now well-established formula, Fotografia Europea 2010 will once again be presenting several original productions by European artists invited to offer their personal iconographic interpretation of the key theme of the festival. 

Francesco Jodice – an internationally renowned photographer particularly sensitive to the topic of the changing nature of contemporary cities in terms of the relationships existing between people and “rocks” (a term he uses to refer to “solid” urban components such as architectural, infrastructural and technological features) – is the author of a project jointly commissioned by Car Server and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia curated by Marinella Paderni. The project addresses the theme of mobility and the evolution of the car from the status of a good to that of a service. A series of large photographs, portraying the car on a 1:1 scale embodies its reality as a “place” where we spend part of our lives and in which we learn to perceive the landscape, capturing swift changes in the environment and in the contexts we drive through.

In the context of the SETSE (Seeing European Culture Through a Stranger's Eyes) European project, the festival will be presenting the study conducted by French photographer Alain Willaume in Reggio Emilia entitled La parte in comune + Rumori di un banchetto gioioso (The shared part + Noises from a joyful banquet). Alain Willaume engaged many families participating in the project, portraying them during their meals and immediately after, focussing on daily domestic rituals and going on to ask every family member to distance themselves from the surrounding reality and to seek inner concentration. The exhibit also contains a selection of photographs which the artist took from the photo albums of the families participating in the project and from a series of images belonging to the Municipality's historical archives, working in collaboration with the Photo-Library of the Panizzi Library in Reggio Emilia's and Anne Testut.
 
 The projects
The exhibition programme of the fifth Fotografia Europea festival is boosted by a selection of special projects involving young talents from Italy and abroad including Maurizio Agostinetto, Alessia Bernardini, Sonia Panciroli, Elisa Pellacani, Alessandro Rizzi and Machiel Botman from the Netherlands. Of great impact are the images by English photographer Kevin Cummins, who from the seventies to today has been portraying some of the most celebrated musicians from the British independent scene such as Joy Division, The Clash, Sex Pistols, R.E.M., U2, Patti Smith, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Oasis.

In keeping with the prime goal of the exhibition, which has always been sensitive to new trends in the international photography scene, the exhibition programme of Fotografia Europea 2010 contains a number of joint projects that bring together the products of  several artists' photography studies, offering composite and original interpretations of the most diverse contexts of reality. They include: Al di là delle apparenze opache (Beyond opaque appearances), a selection of images produced by young authors and established artists - Nunzio Battaglia, Maggie Cardelús (Spain-United States), Martina Della Valle, Martina Dinato, Thomas Flechtner (Switzerland), Pierluigi Fresia, Francesca Grilli (Italy-Netherlands), Daniele Lira, Claudia Losi, Esko Männikkö (Finland), Lala Meredith-Vula (Bosnia Herzegovina), Jari Silomäki (Finland), Pio Tarantini, Davide Tranchina, Devis Venturelli, Dubravka Vidović (Croatia), and Thomas Wrede (Germany) - curated by Gigliola Foschi; the joint exhibit of the eight photographers - György Gáti (Hungary), Simona Ghizzoni (Italy), Alain Willaume (France), Vanessa Pastor (Spain), Martti Kapanen (Finland), Tomasz Galecki (Poland), Georgios Makkas (Greece), and Petra Cepková (Slovakia) – who participated in the SETSE (Seeing European Culture Through a Stranger's Eyes) European project; and a selection of images by Dita Pepe, Léa Crespi and Rob Hornstra, the winners of the first international competition of industrial photography sponsored by GD4PhotoArt, shown alongside the four winners of the second such competition.

More than ever in tune with the key theme of the 2010 festival is the Mondi incantati (Enchanted worlds) exhibition project by Reggio Children, involving the infant-toddler centres, preschools and primary schools of Reggio Emilia and with the international contribution of 13 institutions from 10 different countries. It consists of two exhibits held in association with the Loris Malaguzzi International Center, one with photographs produced by adults and the other by boys and girls of between 3 and 8, to share with them the sense of enchantment and the vision that raises questions, investigates, reformulates and creates new realities. Their parallel display is a deliberate choice that seeks to convey the cross sectional nature of ideas, perceptions and enchantments, regardless of age differences.

To add even more flavour to the projects section of the festival, an exhibit will be devoted to the Santa Croce neighbourhood of Reggio Emilia, explored artistically by a group of photographers made up of Fabrizio Cicconi, Lorenza Franzoni, Mirella Gazzotti, Pietro Iori, Manuela Pecorari and Alessandro Scillitani.

Finally, the collection of photographs, graphics works and art books of one of Italy's leading figures in abstract art Luigi Veronesi, produced through the research and promotion work of the director of the Galleria Martano of Turin, Liliana Dematteis, will be on display at the Panizzi Library of Reggio Emilia to which it was donated.

The exhibit catalogue, published by Electa in both English and Italian and available at the festival opening, contains a rich selection of the exhibited works – together with essays by the curator Elio Grazioli and contributions by the critics who collaborated in the production of the fifth festival and leading personalities of the national and international intellectual scene.