FOTOGRAFIA EUROPEA 2025
“BEING TWENTY”

Reggio Emilia
24 April – 8 June 2025

Preview 24 April
Opening events from 24 to 27 April 2025

The 20th edition of the Reggio Emilia festival is dedicating its exhibitions to a time of life when the possibilities seem endless.

Chiostri di San Pietro, Palazzo da Mosto, Palazzo dei Musei, Biblioteca Panizzi, Spazio Gerra and the Circuito OFF venues will play host to exhibitions by both the greats of photography and emerging talents

From 24 April to 8 June 2025, Reggio Emilia will yet again examine changes in contemporary society through the eyes of the greats of photography and emerging talents with the 20th edition of FOTOGRAFIA EUROPEA, the festival organised and promoted by Fondazione Palazzo Magnani and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region.

“BEING TWENTY” is the theme chosen by the festival’s artistic directors Tim Clark (editor of 1000 Words), Walter Guadagnini (photography historian and director of CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia) and Luce Lebart (researcher and curator, Archive of Modern Conflict).

How many times, as adults, do we say “if only I was twenty again”? A phrase, an expression that, in an ideal world, would free us from the responsibilities and burdens of being grown-ups and take us back to a time bathed by the waters and lightness of youth, when everything was still a wonderful possibility and the future was just waiting to be written.

But what does it mean to young people today to be twenty? Twenty is an age of contradictions; twenty-year-olds are adults, but often still live at home with their parents; they are connected to the whole world, but the loneliness can be overwhelming. They face huge expectations, both personal and social: finding a fulfilling job, building meaningful relationships, giving a sense to their own existence, and imagining a better world, for themselves and others.

This year, Fotografia Europea wanted to follow this path, walk part of the way alongside the young people of Generation Z, who have grown up at a time when technological progress has opened up infinite possibilities, but also unprecedented crises to be tackled, individually and collectively. This generation is rediscovering the importance and need to fight for their rights and for a more equitable future.

The projects chosen examine this and much more besides, drawing attention to stories that may be new and unusual but are also bursting with that boundless vital energy that makes you believe, at least once in your life, that you can change the world.

EXHIBITIONS

CHIOSTRI DI SAN PIETRO
via Emilia San Pietro, 44/c

Daidō Moriyama » A Retrospective
Organized by Instituto Moreira Salles
Curated by Thyago Nogueira, Instituto Moreira Salles

Over the course of his sixty-year career, Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka) decisively altered how we experience photography. He used his camera to investigate post-war Japanese society and document his surroundings, but he also questioned the nature of photography itself.

His unmistakable visual language is as lauded as his countless publications, which are central to his work.

This retrospective will be the first to exhibit most of his famous series along with dozens of Moriyama’s photobooks and magazines, plus numerous works and large-scale installations. Taken together, is presents one of the most innovative and influential artists and street photographers of our day.

Moriyama’s photographic subjects captivated viewers from the start, whether he was working with mass media and advertisements, societal taboos, or the theatricality of everyday life. He captured the clash of Japanese tradition and accelerated Westernization following the US military occupation of Japan after the end of World War II. Inspired by US artists such as Andy Warhol and William Klein, the photographer vivisected burgeoning consumer society in Japan. He explored the reproducibility of images, their dissemination, and consumption. Over and again, Moriyama placed his archive of images in new contexts, playing with enlargements, crops, and image resolution. Even today, his pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain groundbreaking.

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is the product of a three-year research period, and is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever mounted of this artist’s work. It is organized by Instituto Moreira Salles in cooperation with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Chosen by The Guardian as the year`s best photo show in London. This show has been presented at Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo), C/O Berlin, The Photographer’s Gallery (London), The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki) and PhotoElysée (Lausanne), at Fotografia Europea it arrives for its first Italian stop.

Andy Sewell » Slowly and Then All at Once

What is the precise moment when problems become clear, and the strategies to address and solve them also become apparent? When does the cost of inaction become too high? What prevents those in power from taking the necessary steps to resolve the issue? What can be done to help future generations? What is the current impact of climate change on young people?
These are just a few of the questions that Andy Sewell’s Slowly and Then All at Once aims to bring to the surface. The work is rooted in the climate crisis and the broader contemporary debate surrounding it, with the goal of redirecting attention to the ever-present, though often unevenly experienced, feeling of being immersed in a climate and ecological crisis. The project explores the intertwined relationships between different forms of power, both bottom-up and top-down. It combines photographs of climate protests, high-profile climate diplomacy negotiations, and debates with more personal images, creating a visual diary of the artist’s day-to-day surroundings. According to Sewell, we live in an era defined by a real breakdown of the system, staggering inequality, and deeply inadequate political representation. With Slowly and Then All at Once, the aim is to counteract the sense of surrender that can arise in such an oppressive situation by creating something with physicality, rhythm, and intensity—something that pushes beyond the dead ends of cynicism and resignation.

Claudio Majorana » Mal de Mer

Mal de Mer explores the theme of adolescence as a phase of life during which we are confronted by personal issues for the first time, issues that, according to the artist’s vision, often remain anchored in our lives even once we have moved on to adulthood, continuing to shape and influence it.

The project is set in Lithuania, a former Soviet country with a profoundly scarred political past and the highest suicide rate in Europe.

Under an intense gaze, the subjects portrayed appear to be overflowing with questions, fears and doubts, their thoughts racing at top speed. Claudio Majorana’s attention is attracted by moments when, intent on investigating their inner selves, the protagonists of his photographs discover answers they are also struggling to formulate, trapped by insecurity. In the timeless journey of self-expression, feeling free to share our own truth and reveal ourselves to others is both the hardest struggle and the most sublime achievement.

Marie Sumalla and Ghazal Golshiri » You Don't Die

"Dear Jina, you don't die, your name becomes a symbol".

On 16 September 2022, twenty-two-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini died in a Tehran hospital. Three days earlier, she had been arrested by the police because her attitude did not conform to the dress codes in force in the Islamic Republic of Iran – her hair was too visible and her trousers were unsuitable; she had received blows to the head while in police custody and fallen into a coma. One death, one injustice too many, inflamed the Iranian people. They took over the public space, defied the most violent condemnations, filmed and photographed. They are writing the story of an uprising whose cry “Woman, Life, Freedom” is historic. A war of life against death that has persisted ever since, and whose images Iranians are persisting in for freedom, against the regime.

The body of photographs and videos in this exhibition was assembled and authenticated for Le Monde’s coverage of the 2022 uprising following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in Iran. The authors of these images, taken mainly from social networks, are mostly Iranian citizens who requested anonymity. Others agreed to be named despite the risks.

Vinca Petersen » Raves and Riots

Raves and Riots brings together a collection of seminal diaristic photographs drawn from a period spanning 1990–2004, documenting the artist’s experiences as part of the free party and traveller community. The images juxtapose the sense of escapism and euphoria of this unique cultural moment with the oppressive political climate that outlawed the lifestyles of those responsible for Britain’s rave scene.

The free party wave enraptured Britain’s young generation following the explosion of rave, techno and ecstasy in 1989. Whilst the movement was born of music and hedonism, it quickly became a vehicle for civil disobedience and defiance of authority, as portrayed in images of Petersen and her friends attending protests contesting the political backlash against their way of living.

The 1994 Criminal Justice Bill created a hostile environment for the squatters, travellers and rave organisers that made up the artist’s immediate social circle. In response, Petersen and those closest to her adopted a nomadic lifestyle, transporting powerful sound systems across Europe in truck convoys, setting up parties in countryside locations on the outskirts of urban areas.

Despite the movement’s iconic significance, photographic documentation of the rave scene is sparse, as the community was wary of outsiders taking pictures for fear of legal repercussions, so cameras were routinely confiscated at parties. Working with inconspicuous cameras, Petersen’s insider’s perspective is at times contemplative and unflinching, and elsewhere frenetic. Whether through empathetic personal proximity to her subjects or atmospheric immersion in each scene, Petersen’s implied presence and participation in the world she depicts is an underlying constant.

Jessica Ingram » We Are Carver

In We Are Carver, acclaimed photographer Jessica Ingram invites you into George Washington Carver High School in Columbus, Georgia, located just a few miles from Fort Moore, one of the largest military installations in the world. For six years, Ingram explored the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programme there, engaging with the student cadets as they navigated the transition from adolescence to adulthood, all against the backdrop of a changing political landscape. Through vibrant portraits, candid conversations and classroom ephemera, Ingram captures the hopes and fears of a generation on the cusp of shaping their futures. In this pivotal moment in American history, We Are Carver serves as a mirror and a compass, illuminating the resilience and determination of youth in the face of uncertainty, and offering a path forward rooted in acknowledgment, compassion and justice.

Thaddé Comar » How Was Your Dream?

How was your dream? is a photography project created during the protests that took place in Hong Kong between June and October 2019. The work addresses new forms of protest and insurrection in our post-contemporary times dominated by uninterrupted control societies. Five years earlier, in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement had been rapidly repressed by State and police violence. In 2019, the democratic uprising that began in May gathered momentum. Faced by a sophisticated arsenal of control, the Hong Kong protesters developed several techniques based on principles of invisibility and untraceability that allowed them to mitigate the effects of the repression. These new mechanisms, which help transform methods of struggle and resistance, lead, nevertheless, to a loss of individuality.

Kido Mafon » IFUCKTOKYO - DUAL MAIN CHARACTER

Tokyo is an energetic, chaotic, and vibrant city that never sleeps. But at the same time, it can drag you into a hole, where everyone is constantly in the endless cycle of the unconscious quest to become someone, to find meaning in their existence, and to affirm in relation to others.

IFUCKTOKYO emerges from this sensation, disciplined by society but with a rebellious spirit within.

Photographer Kido Mafon captures scenes of the city’s frenetic nightlife and youth culture, shooting on film with a Contax G1. From club kids with layered, multicoloured hair to new-wave tech-blokecore j-rappers and rabid Tokyo Vitamin fans, Mafon navigates the city after dark to document the most feverish club nights.

This series contrasts the conflicting duality within a person, highlighting the city’s party scenes as a symbol in which the free spirited people abandon themselves and the other true character of a person appears, which is more vibrant than ever.

Toma Gerzha » Control Refresh

Control Refresh is the result of the photographer Toma Gerzha’s research into the impact of political events on young people in several former Soviet countries. Over the last three years, Gerzha has met teenagers in remote towns in Russia and Eastern Europe. She has amassed a large collection of photographs of young people who have shared their vulnerability with her, let her into their boredom and talked to her about their dreams.

In 2021, Gerzha set out on her first major photographic journey across Russia. She contacted teenagers in small towns through social media and spent days (sometimes weeks) with them. She documented their lives and surrounding environment, took notes and wrote their stories. Her project was interrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but she decided to include this change in her research and continued to visit her subjects regularly.

By late 2023, she had built a collection of stories of young people in Eastern Europe, recording how their lives and choices were influenced by the political decisions made by their countries. Without realising it, Gerzha created her own timeline in which she recorded how a free country quickly closed itself off from the world and how its inhabitants tried to adapt to the changes.

Karla Hiraldo Voleau » Frammenti

Frammenti is an ongoing project by Karla Hiraldo Voleau that explores the emotional lives and relationships of Italian teenagers in their final years of high school. Inspired by Pasolini’s Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings, 1964), she travels across Italy to create a contemporary portrait of Gen Z through personal interviews. The themes she examines include evolving communication, dating, the influence of social media and feminism in a currently binary society, grappling with issues such as femicide and tackling a curious masculinity crisis.

The project culminates in analogue portraits paired with transcriptions of these conversations, presented as text-image compositions that weave together different personal experiences, to dive into the collective experience.


PALAZZO DA MOSTO via Mari, 7

Federica Sasso » Intangibili Commission 2025

According to Young Care Italia, seven in every hundred young people aged between fourteen and twenty-five in Italy are caring for other members of their family. These, often invisible, young people deal with caring responsibilities that translate into an average of twenty-three hours a week dedicated to helping others.
To explore this phenomenon in more detail, Fotografia Europea, in partnership with the Community Care and Sustainable City area of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia ‘Youth and Care Project’ and FCR - Farmacie Comunali Riunite, commissioned the photographer Federica Sasso to document the reality of young caregivers.
After approaching them sensitively, Sasso came into contact with these girls and boys in search of patterns and differences, to draw a complex portrait that unites the particular features of a time of life marked by big changes and energy, with the awareness of a caring role that is often neither recognised nor valued, but which involves sacrifices, resilience and responsibility.
Sasso’s visual research does not merely document but, through the use of different languages and media, analyses principles of social recognition and algorithms, suspended between real and digital worlds. To shed light on the impact of an often silent but fundamental role in the lives of many families.

Michele Borzoni » Rocco Rorandelli » Silent Spring Open Call 2025
Silent Spring, by Michele Borzoni and Rocco Rorandelli, investigates environmental activism across Italy, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Austria. The project documents the escalating conflict between activists and Western governments, driven by neo-liberal agendas that treat the environment as a mere commodity for exploitation. Meanwhile, younger generations, particularly those just entering adulthood, are rising up, finding in the fight to defend the planet a new and urgent ground for expression, a way to channel their frustrations with a system that has betrayed them.
The project highlights the resurgence of radical collective action. Abandoned by the political class and betrayed by corporate greed, these young activists reclaim the streets and public spaces through direct, disruptive action. No longer asking for change, the activists are demanding a complete overhaul of a system that sacrifices the planet for profit. This project sheds light on the growing conflict between a system desperately clinging to power and the rising tide of youth resistance that refuses to accept its devastating grip on the planet. For these young activists, defending the environment has become a powerful means of reclaiming both their future and their voice.

Matylda Niżegorodcew » Octopus’s Diary Open Call 2025

In Octopus’s Diary Matylda Niżegorodcew attempts to respond to recurring questions that have tormented her existence: "What if I hadn’t given up my passions, dreams or ambitions? What if I had made different choices, lived somewhere else or been a different gender?"
To give shape to these answers, the artist looks for people in which she finds the qualities she wants or feels she is lacking; people with characteristics that she dreams of and which seem to make their lives fuller and happier. For forty-eight hours the artist borrows a piece of their lives and identities, measuring herself up against these models and incorporating them into her own personal story by bringing them into her everyday life. She wears their clothes, sleeps in their beds, sneaks into their existence to see what it is like to live their lives. She is able to get close enough to these lives to go beyond any filters and experience the absurd paradox of being someone else.
Every step along this process of knowledge, exchange and identification is documented and sometimes it is the subjects themselves who step into the shoes of the photographer, so that the experiment distorts perspective and is even filtered through the eyes of the portrait’s intended subject.

Fluorescent Adolescent.
a photobook exhibition curated by Francesca Colombelli

Fluorescent Adolescent explores adolescence, a complex and pivotal period of life, in its nuances and contradictions. The images in the photobooks depict a universal journey that transcends the personal, reflecting physical, emotional, and social transformations. The photographs capture moments of rebellion, fragility, discovery, and belonging, offering an authentic snapshot of the inner struggle to find one's place in the world.
Although the selected books tell stories rooted in different cultures and contexts, highlighting how the transition from adolescence to adulthood can vary depending on cultural, religious, economic, and political factors, the emotions and experiences tied to the growth process are both universal and uniquely lived.
These photobooks tell stories of change that speak to the present and future. Adolescence is a time of uncertainties, but promises and potential are yet to be discovered, inviting reflection on what it means to be young in the world.

Rä di Martino » Electric Whispers
curated by Maria Rosa Sossai

Electric Whispers examines the importance of the role of gathering and meeting places for young people living in Lebanon during a dramatic period marked by escalating conflicts. Through her travels to Lebanon since 2023 and a fiction film project also shot in Beirut, the artist has delved into the world of young people to study their virtual and physical meeting spaces. Virtual meetings in video games and the creation of avatars and fictional identities are often experienced by younger generations as an escape from complex living conditions, while video games become accessible and safe spaces for socialisation, where the impetuous vitality that accompanies formative years seems to find answers. The places featured in Rä di Martino’s images help with re-emerging from disorientation.
Electric Whispers is a project designed for the Italian Cultural Institute in Beirut.

Women See Many Things
A WeWorld project along the Swahili Coast

The Swahili Coast is a strip of land extending along the eastern edge of Kenya, Tanzania and northern Mozambique; in these border areas, shared ambitions and fears are typical among those in their twenties and thirties.
These are places where traditions, the opinions of elders and social divides meet and clash with the aspirations of new generations, their creativity and need for self-assertion. Being "young" and above all a "woman", in these cases, can coincide with many things: the need to reclaim a public space designed only for men, overcoming the gender stereotype; pride in showing how one’s work – even in the domestic sphere – has a central function in society’s well-being and harmony.
Women See Many Things intends to give space to the multiple gazes of young women from Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, where WeWorld held three photography workshops in February and March 2024, directed by photographer Myriam Meloni and led by photographers Halima Gongo in Kenya, Gertrude Malizeni in Tanzania and Nelsa Guambe in Mozambique.
The photography workshops that resulted in Women See Many Things were conducted as part of Kujenga Amani Pamoja (Building Peace Together), a project co-funded by the European Union and implemented by WeWorld in the coastal areas bordering Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.
The pictures taken during the workshops will be exhibited outdoors on the grounds of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Viale Allegri, while the history of the project and the creative process that led to the shots will be exhibited in Palazzo da Mosto.


Partner Exhibitions

PALAZZO DEI MUSEI
via Spallanzani, 1

Luigi Ghirri » Lezioni di fotografia (working title)
curated by Ilaria Campioli
promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia (Musei Civici, Biblioteca Panizzi) in partnership with the Luigi Ghirri Estate and ISIA Urbino
24 April 2025 – 1 March 2026

Between 1989 and 1990, Luigi Ghirri held a series of photography lessons at the Università del Progetto in Reggio Emilia. Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of the medium, these lectures became an opportunity for Ghirri to revisit his own work, explore key themes and delve into the broader history of photography, placing it within the wider context of image history. In 2010, Paolo Barbaro and Giulio Bizzarri compiled these lessons into a book published by Quodlibet, which soon became a new and essential entry point into Ghirri’s work, as well as a reference for new generations of artists.
This exhibition seeks to revisit Ghirri’s lessons from a new perspective, involving artists Luca Capuano and Stefano Graziani, alongside a group of students from ISIA Urbino. It offers a space to reflect on the intentions and poetics behind the exercises presented in Lezioni di fotografia and, more broadly, on their practice and significance.
At the same time, the exhibition also examines the role of photography as a medium. Since its invention, photography has been a privileged teaching tool in numerous disciplines, particularly in the arts. In the educational field, where reproduction and transcription are central processes, photography reveals what Monica Maffioli defines as its "double life", highlighting its"authorial, material, ambiguous and unsettling"nature.

Giovane Fotografia Italiana #12 | Premio Luigi Ghirri 2025
Bridging
curated by Ilaria Campioli and Daniele De Luigi
made possible thanks to European Funds from the Emilia-Romagna Region promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia in partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute of Stockholm in partnership with GAI - Associazione per il Circuito dei Giovani Artisti Italiani, Fotografia Europea, Fotodok, Utrecht, Fotofestiwal, Łódz; Photoworks, Brighton with the help of Reire srl and sponsorship by the Gruppo Giovani Imprenditori Unindustria Reggio Emilia

The group exhibition shows the photographs of the seven finalists of the Ghirri Prize: Daniele Cimaglia and Giuseppe Odore with La Dote di Latera, Davide Sartori with The Shape of Your Eyes, Other Things I Don't Know, Erdiola Kanda Mustafaj with Pasqyra e Lëndës (Summary), Grace Martella with Memorie del transitare, Rosa Lacavalla with La Festa dell’Equatore, Sara Lepore with Ingrediente pentru un tort de miere, cu dragoste, Serena Radicioli with Non sei più tornato.
Unire/Bridging encourages reflection on how images can act as "bridges" and carry out a function of connecting, creating dialogue and bringing people together, as well as caring for the outside world. Bridges not only between photographer and subject, but also between image and viewer, to become a place and space for solidarity.
The finalists will compete for the prestigious Premio Luigi Ghirri, worth €4,000, as well as other important recognitions such as the Nuove Traiettorie. GFI a Stoccolma mention, promoted in partnership with the IIC in Stockholm, which offers one of the artists selected the chance to spend time studying and researching, during which they will be asked to develop an artistic project to be put on display in an exhibition curated by the institute. Finally, one of the finalists will have the opportunity to receive a scholarship to take part in the Photo-Match portfolio review programme at Fotofestiwal Łódź.

SPAZIO GERRA
piazza XXV Aprile, 2

Volpe Laila Slim e gli altri
Resistance at Twenty
curated by Stefania Carretti, Lorenzo Immovilli and Erika Profumieri with Massimo Storchi and Marco Cerri

The exhibition aims to explore the complex experience of young partisans during the Italian Resistance (1943-45), in the context of the eightieth anniversary of the Liberation. Through a series of themed sections, the exhibition illustrates the daily life, challenges, gender emancipation, ethical choices and environmental framework in which these young people operated, reflecting on the meaning of being twenty during a time of war. The stories of Volpe (Francesco Bertacchini, 1926-2024), Laila (Anita Malavasi, 1921-2011), Slim (Luciano Fornaciari, 1925-1944) and many other twenty-year-olds who, with their eloquent battle names, participated in the Resistance, offer a deeper and more personal understanding of what it means to rebel and fight for freedom, emphasising the multifaceted experiences, courage and resilience of those young partisans.
Alongside historical photographs from the Istoreco photo archive and original documents, diaries, letters and posters from the period, the exhibition will benefit from the contribution of five artists and photographers called upon to provide a contemporary visual interpretation of the values and themes revealed by the archive documents. With their diverse and personal works, ranging from analogue photography to collaboration with artificial intelligence, and involving young people themselves in the projects, Alessandro Bartoli, Marco Belletti, Lorenzo Falletti, Alessia Leporati and Andrea Sciascia bring a glimpse of what it means to resist today for Gen Z.

BIBLIOTECA PANIZZI
via Farini, 3

Attraverso la luce
The first twenty years of photography in the library’s collections
curated by Monica Leoni and Elisabeth Sciarretta with Laura Gasparini
24 April – 5 July

The exhibition staged by the Panizzi Library brings together photographs, documents and engravings from the first twenty years of the history of photography contained in the photographic archive’s collections; the library acquired these items through donations and acquisitions, and they have been preserved to document the history of photographic techniques.
The magic of light has been the subject of important scientific studies for centuries, but it has also fascinated the world of art, and subsequently popular culture. Photography, a product of various historical processes, represents a chapter in the annals of visual history, intricately linked with the disciplines of art, science and technology. The common thread that binds these fields together is their shared curiosity and passion for the advent of a new and enthralling language.
The exhibition is structured along chronological lines, showcasing a curated selection of rare photographs on salted paper, along with a notable set of daguerreotypes from the Mandarino and Davoli collections, and the distinguished Michael G. Jacob collection, recently augmented through a significant donation from the esteemed collector. A significant section of the exhibition is dedicated to the preservation cases that house these invaluable artefacts.
The exhibition will also include documents that bear witness to the dissemination of photography in the Estense dukedom, where this new technology arrived only a few years after the first image captured by a Daguerreotype machine was presented by L.J.M. Daguerre to the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1839.
The story of the exhibition provides a historical perspective, guiding visitors through the pioneering years of scientific experimentation involving light, chemistry and the transformation of materials such as silver, culminating in the art of portraiture and landscape photography.

COLLEZIONE MARAMOTTI
via Fratelli Cervi, 66

Viviane Sassen » This Body Made of Stardust
27 April – 27 July

Collezione Maramotti presents This Body Made of Stardust, an extensive solo exhibition by Viviane Sassen comprising more than fifty photographs and a video, all dating from 2005 to 2025, with several new works made specifically for the occasion. The show is the most extensive presentation of Sassen’s work in Italy to date and is curated by the artist herself.

Revolving around the concept and iconography of the memento mori, the photos on view trace branching paths through the infinite possibilities and nuances of life. It appears fertile, intense, and overflowing, but also intrinsically fragile: (abstractions of) human bodies, landscapes, dust, earth and organic matter become symbols and recurring reminders of death—an inevitable passage in the transformation of all that lives.

Sassen invites us into a many-sided, dreamlike, seductive universe, instilled with Surrealism, forming a dialogue with sculptures from Collezione Maramotti. Sassen, who has a deep connection to three-dimensional art also calls herself a sculptor. She shapes light – and, above all, shadow, a metaphor for the torments and desires of the human psyche, introducing paint, ink, and collage into her practice to add a new dimension to the photographic image.

In her attempt to “grant structure to chaos,” Sassen transfigures the normal Latin term into her own memento amoris, inviting viewers to see the beauty and awe of passage. We are dust (and to dust we will return), but that dust is stardust.