SI FEST 2018 UNDER THE RENEWAL
Newsrimini - The SI FEST of Savignano changes its face for its 27th edition, from 14 to 30 September. New artistic direction and renewal in the panorama of festivals in Italy, entering in the heart of the Sistema Festival Italia, the network for the promotion of photography festivals in Italy, promoted by MiBACT. "On Being Now" is the title of this year's event, which changes its face. Exhibitions, events, portfolio readings and photographic awards will be included among the initiatives of the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018. The festival is promoted as every year by the Municipality of Savignano sul Rubicone, Department of Culture, and organized by the Association Savignano Immagini .
This year, the aim will be to encourage the meeting of the new generation with the professional world of photography. The new artistic direction will be formed by three professionals and curators of the sector: Roberto Alfano, Laura De Marco and Christian Gattinoni.
The event involves, as every year, the entire historic center of Savignano sul Rubicone, starting from Piazza Borghesi, the center and fulcrum of the Festival, where the portfolio readings will take place, up to Corso Vendemini on which the main exhibition spaces overlook. Palazzo Martuzzi, Vecchia Pescheria and Monte di Pietà, the latter will become a space dedicated to younger people.
Also the Via Emilia is involved in the area of the Consorzio di Bonifica, Montemaggi Desiger and Euromobili Montemaggi, while beyond the Rubicon, inside the historic Palazzo Don Baronio, there will be the OFF circuit of the Festival.
THE ARTISTS
Attention focused on internationally renowned artists, who will present unpublished works, never shown in Italy.
'I Want Your Love' is the visual autobiography of Richard Renaldi , the story of the most intimate moments of an apparently enchanted life. At the age of 10 Renaldi made his first self-portrait, in the bathroom of the family home in the suburbs of Chicago, starting a self-analysis work through the camera that went on for a lifetime. Starting from the 1970s in his native Chicago, 'I Want Your Love', the fifth monograph published by the author published in 2018, follows the period from infancy to middle age, exploring what it means to be young and in perpetual research, find and lose the things we most deeply want to preserve.
Murray Ballard travels between fantasy and technology with 'The Prospect of Immortality' work that takes its name from the book by Robert Ettinger that gave rise to the idea of 'cryonics': the process of freezing a human body after death in the hope that scientific progress can someday restore life. His photographic survey, from 2006 to 2016, is a journey through the international cryogenic community, from the English town of Peacehaven, near the sea; through Arizona's high-tech laboratories; to the rudimentary structures of KrioRus, on the outskirts of Moscow.
The series of images that make up the work 'Internat' by Carolyn Drakethey were made between 2014 and 2016 in a Russian orphanage, still operational, where young people with disabilities are brought, especially women who become adults within their walls in complete isolation. This project, which is collected in the homonymous book, published in 2017, has given rise to a real collaboration with some of the young people within the structure. Thanks to Carolyn's push, in fact, the girls have become in turn artists and creators. Nature, the objects of everyday life and the walls of the orphanage have become means to explore issues such as social control, individual and collective identity, freedom of imagination and the normalization of female behavior.
The Belgian author Max Pinckers , in his work, explores the strategies of visual storytelling in documentary photography and the relationship between aesthetics, images and subjects. As in previous works, in 'Margins of Excess' , a self-produced book in 2018, it intertwines reality and fiction to reveal to the viewer a more intricate vision of our world. The author proposes six incredible stories of people who have made a stir in the American media, all strictly fake, in order to underline the subjective and fictitious nature of the categories we use to define the world, also calling into question the 'objective models' of journalistic media.
Ina Lounguine is a Ukrainian artist, born in 1993 in Odessa, the youngest daughter in a family of activists and intellectuals, grew up with great curiosity and awareness, carrying on her artistic studies at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts. His work aims to trigger debates on political and social issues, aiming to encourage dialogue through visual metaphors. In the work on display 'The Price Of A Black Life In America' , he focuses on racism from the events of Ferguson and Baltimore. On show the artist also presents the video 'Chaos Disco' in which the dance becomes exorcism against the dramas of the world.
The body of work by Lucie Khahoutian , an Armenian visual artist from Erevan, aims to create a meeting point between contemporary Western and traditional Armenian visual culture. His works deal with a wide range of subjects, although they are very focused on religion, spirituality and mystical issues. In ' With all this darkness round I fell less alone' the starting point of the series was the relationship between isolation and madness.
Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti in 'INDEX G - discontinuity between adjacent human spatial systems' , start from the Gini index, a statistical measure of inequality, to investigate the phenomenon of residential segregation. A work, published in 2018, carried out in the suburbs of the United States where the phenomenon is increasing and is now manifested in macro geographical areas. Both authors use photography as a means of exploring the world around them and the relationships between the environment, society and themselves.
'125' by Paolo Ciriegia comes from the reworking of the author's experience in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict of 2014, re-enactment of the EuroMaidan Square bloodbath in Kiev in which one hundred and twenty-five people died under the fire of the Ukrainian police. The work is a multimedia installation in which each object is reinterpreted and conceptualized with the aim of re-elaborating the memory of the incident, creating a sort of anti-testimony, an implicit criticism of the rhetoric of official commemorations. The author, who for five years has focused his research on political ideologies, alienation and the means of mass control, dissects and elaborates languages and their symbols in order to unveil the atrocities behind the war and to destroy the false and arrogant patina created by propaganda.
'Azimuths of Celestial Bodies ' is an autobiographical journey that the young photographer Francesco Levy tells through the story of his family. A reinterpretation of memories handed down that goes through wars and migrations and comes down to us in the form of a diary for images.
Filippo Venturi , winner of the Italy Portfolio Award 2017, will exhibit the multi-published project "Korean Dream", the last chapter of his research in the North Korean peninsula through which he perceives the pervasive control that is breathed in Pyongyang: from the playgrounds to the impressive theaters from the pools to the billiard room, everything seems frozen.
Andrea and Magda , winners of the 2017 Pesaresi Award, are a couple of photographers working in the Middle East area. The work that they have done, thanks to the contributions of the award and which will be on display in Savignano, is Rawabi: a series of images that tells the homonymous Palestinian city designed and built in the West Bank by the Palestinian-American billionaire Bashar Masri.
Špela Volčič , winner of the SI FEST / Portfolio 17 'Lanfranco Colombo' award with the work 'Et Fiat Lux' , exhibits her plates drawing inspiration from the pictorial style of Dutch still life, creating portraits of a plastic nature illuminated with an equally light artificial and electric. The author suggests a possible answer to the forms of consumption of images, the photographs of Volčič affirm the need to observe carefully, to penetrate the subject of the composition with an analytical gaze.
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