Winners Open Call 2022

The theme of the first edition of Fiumefreddo Photo Festival is Midway: between past and future.

We want to face the inevitability of time by trying to bind it, as far as possible, to lasting solid points. Traits of discontinuity that tell current moment by inserting it in a frame of perspective, that renew the attention on what is still too precious to be lost, that trace profiles of possible futures by updating their suggestion.

The last two terrible, unpredictable and intense years clearly reflect the measure of turbulence: the only graft of unpredictability capable to ripply the linear flow of conventional time. The profound social, political and economic mutations call into question what until recently was the established theorem.

In this context, the photographer’s critical, creative and sensitive gaze must propose original and stimulating furtherances through stories that can provide unknown interpretations of the aforementioned epochal changes.

Therefore we are looking for stories of the past, present and future with a strongly emotional cut.

The project explores the boundary between fantasy and reality at the origins of fairy tales and popular beliefs. During a trip to Calabria, I collected memoirs in which blood is identified as a powerful element. Its role as a practical indicator of life, history and absolute bonds makes it capable of exerting influence on free will, seasonal fertility cycles and reasons of life and death. These stories have been united and reworked into a single narrative flow that sees them sprout and flourish from each other. The images represent a personal search for the incredible, the irrational, the invisible flow that determines fascination for the ancestral. They suggest a complementary vision of acceptance of the fantastic and its origins. What is today tied to childhood has in fact ancient roots, determined by an observation and communion with nature that contemporary and scientific development have made superfluous. Recognizing power in natural elements such as water and blood in the peasant culture of southern Italy was a pragmatic action taken by these people to understand that which surrounded them. Magic and those who exercised it, spells, potions, miracles are based on the ability to distinguish natural dynamics, vital and organic flows and to arrange them into a hierarchy. This book is not about the need to believe again, but rather about remembering why what was believed was believed, what dynamics led to the development of popular beliefs and where their origins lie. This undervalued historical parallel has left children with a lesson for adults. Living in a world full of answers flattens the possibility of vision and imagination. Searching for the fairy tale and the magical power in my daily life is a show of respect for the stories and cultures that are disappearing in this territory, erased by the race for modernization, during which the need for reality and concreteness risks both the loss of imagination, and the loss of the relational dynamics defined by direct involvement with one’s surroundings.
Within the project, the stories have been united and reworked into a single narrative flow that sees them germinate and blossom from one another. They are interwoven with images that suggest a vision that is at times complementary and at times parallel, in a personal journey of research and acceptance of the invisible Migration onto the seashore is the 1960s phenomenon, which saw the villagers of the Calabria mountainside begin constructing new housing complexes on the coast, with the aim of following an economic and social development that began to characterize the south as a land of seaside tourism. This abandonment of native villages, stones, mule tracks, pastures and mountains is seen by many as a pivotal moment in the process of the loss of collective memory, pagan beliefs, and a Panic spirituality that previously permeated the territory.

I was born dead on the 8th of August 1989. Cyanotic and hypotonic, I was intubated and resuscitated by a cardiac massage. After 5 minutes my vital values stabilized. Over the years, this event has taken on different meanings for me. It has always been hidden in a corner of my body. A body that kept its secret, its absolute reasons and its unanswered questions. This very first episode of my life legitimized my oddities, defended my limitations, exasperated my desperation and my being different and distant from the rest of the world. It supported my disobedience. Then I felt the need to search for myself, to declare to my own self that I existed. I began to ask my body to attempt to remember where it had been, what language it had spoken while trying to begin its journey. I put myself in the shoes of a speleologist, an astronaut, a diver, a scientist, a researcher. I entered my sidereal craters, in my rocky calcifications, in the fusional dimension that time takes on when it does not exist. I saw myself scattered in the light, I confused myself for a stone, I hid inside my mother’s from whom there could be no separation. I started from death, by contradiction.

“How does memory inform our experience of a place, and our perception of space? This is the main question underlying Francesca Corriga’s poetic and subtle work. By means of multiple and long exposures, she makes use of monochromatic abstractions in order to present such experiences, filtered and layered by memories of both past and hypothetical events.”

Elisa Medde, Fotofilmic JRNL 5 Summer 2020 Issue Guest Editor

Rapide fughe is a black and white collection of pictures taken during the last years. It represents a personal photographic experience through Sardinian landscapes, its myths and legends. It is also a transposition of dreams and nightmares.

Transgender people in Italy are facing culturally and politically determined. According to data provided by Rainbow Europe, Italy ranks 35th out of 49 European countries in terms of the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. Can traversing the journey of a person who is becoming himself, prompt us to reconsider the web of a country’s culture that makes his path of awareness uncertain and painful? My Name is Nico aims to build a portrait of my childhood friend Nico, who is transitioning from female to male. My Name is Nico explores gender and the politics around it through an intimate look into the life of Nico. The political insensitivity of Italy towards LGBTQ+ people became a reality through the felt experience of Nico’s life. The portrayal of Nico and his life surrounded by friends, family, uncertainty and joy is a challenges the idea that LGBTQ+ people should be denied equal rights. The right to be yourself is inalienable, thusI share Nico’s choice to be himself. I followed Nico in his daily life and visually represented what he told me about his journey of growth and identity building. Together we explored his roots and his need to remain consistent with what Nico calls “my nature.”The whole project is made in close collaboration with Nico who states: “in Italy there’s just one stereotype that people feed on trying to classify something they don’t really know.Trans people are often seen almost as aliens living in another world.” The final aim of the project is to return an intimate story with the intent to create empathy and consequently identification.

Established in 1968 for the purpose of fragmenting the Île-de-France’s “red belt,” the Seine-Saint- Denis department was formed in a way that simultaneously attached it to and isolated it from Paris. Ideologically split from the concomitant capital, it was also demographically, economically, and culturally so, all while still being “the periphery of.” In opposition to Paris’s immutable heritage, the area asserted its own identity through its heterogeneity, the plurality of its voices, and the radicalness of its mutations. As the 2024 Olympic Games loom, of which it is one of the biggest beneficiaries, the Seine-Saint- Denis finds itself caught up in monumental building sites, whose scope contrasts with the reality on the ground. Former vast agricultural plains that have become the most extensive industrial area in Europe, it is now suffering from its early urbanization. The most cosmopolitan department, but also the poorest in mainland France, it is also one of the youngest. Facing a prominent past and a difficult current situation, Seine-Saint-Denis is entering the 2020s with lofty ambitions for the future. At a time when an army of cranes are working the ground just as much to build a shiny future as to bury an annoying present, it is an entire territory which makes its strata appear to our eyes. Agricultural and industrial, natural and urban, poor and opulent, all these asynchronous layers make up a complex landscape, both spatial and temporal, crossed by a constant balance of power. That opposing the morbid repetition of the identical, of the established order and to re- establish, and the vigorous repetition of the difference, that of the life that disappears and springs again. Here, the latter has never seemed so beautiful. But it has also, unfortunately, never seemed so fragile.