In these last weeks of July, three photography festivals are inaugurated in as many Italian regions: Marche, Sicily and Calabria.
The longest running of the three is the Ragusa photo festival, born in 2012 and inspired by the cultural history of the Mediterranean, which in the past represented a crossroads between East and West. Under the direction of the journalist and researcher Stefania Paxhia and Steve Bisson, editor, teacher and curator, the review questions the possibilities of dialogue and conciliation as an opportunity to better understand the challenges of our time. From 21 July to 28 August, twenty-nine projects will be exhibited in various historical places in the city. Between these: Arctic zero by Paolo Verzone, who tells how the climate crisis is experienced by the inhabitants of the Arctic Circle; The day the birds stopped singing by Dutch photographer Rick van der Klooster, who represents the sensations one feels growing up in a world adrift; Mestizo novel by Davide Degano, winner of the New post photography award at the Mia fair and on the impact of the colonial heritage in contemporary Italian society.
For the second edition, the Reportage Festival continues to prefer a dry format, condensed into four days. From 28 to 31 July, the cloister of the Museum of Ceramic Art in Ascoli Piceno will host photojournalists, videomakers and author of radio documentaries who will tell their works live. The idea was born from the photographer Ignacio Maria Coccia to subtract the reportage, in its audiovisual forms, from the current speed of information that sometimes takes away the possibility of further study. The photographers invited this year are Nikos Economopoulus who reviews some of his most famous shots in the Balkans, Turkey and Greece; Francesca Leonardi with the long-term project O’post mine, which follows the life of a woman in Castel Volturno; Massimo Berruti and his experience in the war in Ukraine; Francesco Anselmi who documented the migration crisis between Mexico and the United States.
Finally, a debut, that of the Fiumefreddo photo festival in Fiumefreddo Bruzio, on the coast in the province of Cosenza. The organizers have conceived the event as a widespread, open-air festival, completely involving the Calabrian village in the exhibitions, meetings and workshops that will take place from 29 July to 10 September. For this first edition, the curators paid particular attention to environmental issues, as in Secret Sarayaku, Misha Vallejo’s work on the connection of the Kichwa people with their territory, the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. There is also Marco Zorzanello with Tourism in the climate change era which ironically tells about mass tourism in some of the places most affected by the climate crisis. In TiàWùKfinally, Gabriele Cecconi tells of a planet, not too far from the Earth, which reflects the extreme consequences of the capitalist system and the damage that human beings have caused to the environment.