Luca Santese is the photographer in the new “100” campaign, created in collaboration with Perimetro and XNL Piacenza, with the aim of producing 100 portraits of individuals and personalities who are part of the Piacenza community and who, through their faces, define a new human landscape.
The exhibition will open today at 5 PM, at the XNL Foundation in Piacenza.
“This is the place where young adolescents meet after school, a place where their friendships are strengthened, their first loves are born, and where memories inevitably remain. Like Chiara and Enrico, photographed sheltering under a tree on a rainy day after their last first day of school”.
These pictures were taking in Lecce, Italy during Transizioni art residency 2021 in collaboration with Osservatorio Mobile Nord Est.
The series Parco Belloluogo by Claudio Majorana will be exhibited during OMNEFEST 2023 at Villa Parco Bolasco, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. Claudio will be there tomorrow for the panel discussion with the other photographers who participated in the art residencies OMNE/NATURE2021–2023.
Villa Parco Bolasco (Castelfranco Veneto, Italy)
22 September – 29 October 2023
Thanks to curators Stefania Rossl and Massimo Sordi and to Samuele Vincenti from Transizioni.
@ClaudioMajorana @Transizioni.Art @OsservatorioMobileNordEst
Arianna Arcara’s and Marco zanella’s work done in Moldavia is part of the collective exhibition Testimone Oculare at SiFest 2023.
Arianna Arcara, Marco Zanella , Cristina De Middel and Lorenzo Vitturi thanks to a collaboration with casa Circondariale di Forlì, met five inmates and put themselves at their disposal to report what each of them wished they could see, or see again, in the outside world.
The result is an investigation that crosses the prison walls and becomes a series of projects that are planned and produced on equal terms by the photographers and the inmates.
Opening weekend September 8-9-10, Consorzio di Bonifica, Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy.
The exhibition will also be open on September 16/17 and 23/24.
Cesura Publish’s booth will be present all weekend in one large space dedicated to photo books in the “Dante Alighieri” elementary school gymnasium.
@Arianna_Arcara @Mrz.zanella @laDeMiddel @LorenzoVitturi @AlexMajoliPhoto @SiFest
DIORAMI Meraviglie Botaniche in 8 Atti by Francesca Berardi and Alessandro Sala will open on August 30 in Palermo.
This project curated by Maria Chiara di Trapani was commissioned by SiMuA and made in collaboration with Orto Botanico Palermo. Diorami is the winner of PAC2021 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea Creativa Contemporanea, promoted by Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura.
A multimedial exhibition itinerary addressing the connection between the human and vegetable universe through Alessandro Sala’s photographs in dialogue with Francesca Berardi’s audio narratives, environmental installations and immersive sounds, and unpublished music created by composer Gianni Gebbia.
DIORAMI is a botanical expedition around 8 plant species that are protagonists of Sicily’s natural, social and cultural landscape: the large Ficus macrophylla f. columnaris, the dwarf palm of the Zingaro Nature Reserve; the citrus fruits cultivated in the gardens of Pantelleria; the almond tree of the Kolymbetra Garden; the carob tree of the rural landscape of the Iblei; the fragrant sage, thyme and rosemary of the Val di Noto; the Papyrus of the Ciane River; the centuries-old Holm Oak or Elk (Quercus ilex) in the Etna Park.
Each species will be narrated through the voices of Manlio Speciale, Rosario Schicchi, Paolo Inglese, Giuseppe Barbera, Mariangela Galante, Paolo Arena, Graziella Pavia, Salvatore Murana, Giuseppe Lo Pilato, Gianluca Pannocchietti, Paolino Uccello, Fabio Morreale, Lavinia Lo Faro.
Graphic Design | Exhibition Design: Studio Forward
Ufficio Stampa: CoopCulture
Thanks to Museo del Papiro Corrado Basile
Per info su PAC2021 consultare il sito istituzionale della DGCC
@Torrebert@Sala__Alessandro@OrtoBotanico.Palermo @Creativita_Contemporanea @Gianni_Gebbia @StudioForward @Coopculture_It
TU is a temporary photographic installation by Giorgio Salimeni in Nibbiano, Alta Val Tidone, Italy.
It will be possible to visit the exhibition during Spazio Confluenze Festival.
TU is the name of the small hill that located behind the village of Nibbiano.
It is the symbol of a community where time flows slowly, to the rhythm of a river.
Young people grow up there and from there face the world that awaits them outside. Those who stay welcome those who arrive.
The exhibition will be on view until the end of August.
ARAB SPRING by Arianna Arcara, Alex Majoli, Andy Rocchelli and Luca Santese will be displayed at Alcart Festival in Alcamo (Sicily) from 5 to 9 August.
The revolutionary wind that swept the Arab world was the symbol of our evolving times. Cesura’s photographers documented these events to portray all the facets that defined this process, while watching history in the making. Arcara, Majoli, Rocchelli and Santese’s goal was to save the testimony after the news wave trailed off, committing to an ongoing watch that transcends the duty of reporting.
Almanacco Toilet Club by Valentina Neri will be exhibited at Mosaico Festival in Piazza Armerina, Sicily. Opening August 3rd at 6PM at Atrio Biblioteca, Largo Collegio 20.
Curated by Due Lab Gallery Thanks Mattia Stompo and Carmelo Stompo
Almanacco Toilet Club was released by Cesura Publish in 2018.
From 2014 to 2016, Valentina Neri worked on a photo project about a group of Drag Queens who created a club night that quickly became one of the most important and well known in Milan’s LGBTQIA*+ scene. After portraying the Queens’ growth and the colourful atmosphere of those nights, Valentina focused on the projects’ output; the main inspiration for the book Almanacco is “La Scena Illustrata 1941”, an influential Italian monthly publication born in 1884, that focused on current events with an ironic and straight-forward style. Her research drove her to illustrate and depict the queer world while experimenting with different mediums: a mix of photographs, descriptions, titles, and illustrations enclosed in a “fascist” layout (inspired by the original magazine’s design) give readers and viewers a broader spectrum of interpretation, allowing the development of a different conversation about the community.
@ValentinahNeri @Mosaico_Festival @DueLabGallery @MattiaStompo @Carmelo.Stompo.
Shine On by Alex Zoboli is part of the exhibition FUTURES 2023: New Narratives at Camera Torino
The exhibitions explores the theme of visual representation of contemporaneity.
Curated by Giangavino Pazzola.
Open from July 19th to October 8th 2023.
The project titled “Shine On”, shot in the United Kingdom since 2019, endeavors to capture the fluid essence of a nation in perpetual flux, continuously grappling with its own contradictions as it attempts to carve out a fresh and authentic sense of self in an ever-changing world.
CRONACHE exhibition by Alex Majoli opens tonight in Modica, Italy at 7PM at Ex Convento del Carmine. Open until October 15th.
ALEX MAJOLI, IL TESTIMONE
Alex Majoli’s works represent men, women, children, old people photographed on various continents, in various countries, over the last thirty years. At the same time, they depict suffering, pandemics, pain, walls, borders, the weak, the poor, the marginalised, violence, wars, migration, power, ideologies, faiths, and suffering peoples. This diverse humanity is the protagonist of this Modica exhibition.
The exhibition is presented with a series of tableaux, with some single photos, and then triptychs, polyptychs, ‘photographic’ sequences. Majoli tells stories about wars, police attacks, poverty in the suburbs in the megalopolises of the continents, massacres, loneliness, despair of the entire globe. For him, photography and life are one and the same. He is not the European who looks objectively. His photographic ‘lens’ is the extension of his humanity in participating in the lives of those he meets and with whom he dialogues. His conviction: the theatricality of existence in which everyone plays their part. This is supported by Pirandello, his works and in particular “Six Characters in Search of an Author”. But he also thinks and reflects on Brecht, Artaud and their theatre. And if life is a stage, he begins to photograph events, people as actors of themselves, intensifying the rendering of faces, gestures, actions. He shoots at any time of day or night, but linguistically, photographically the result is not what we imagine, but what he believes can and should be more communicative, more true than what the eye sees, and than what we normally perceive. His images are of an augmented visual reality, and in recent times a reality put on a stage, with actors standing in for or alongside the protagonists of the stories told.
The photographs contained within HOMO SILVIO were taken in Italy from 2010 to 2023 during political, television, and lifestyle events surrounding Silvio Berlusconi. The volume also includes the photographs taken during the state funeral of “Il Cavaliere.”
Argini is a new publication by photographer Marco Zanella, of devastating floods that engulfed the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna in May 2023.
Zanella, the author of the book ‘Scalandrê’ (2021), returned to his beloved Romagna to document the consequences of the flooding that gravely damaged entire towns, destroyed many of its fields, and displaced countless inhabitants.
50% of the sales proceeds will be donated to the Giuseppe Sarti Music School in Faenza, severely affected by the floods.
The fanzine is the second edition of the Dispacci series, created by Cesura Publish with the intention of imprinting Italian news chronicles on newsprint paper.
Printed in Italy, July 2023
Newsprint paper
25×35 cm / 9,8×13,7 in
40 pages, 50 photos
Rotogravure
All photographs shown in this publication were taken in Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
*the product may vary due to the printing process
Pray for Seamen is a photographic research project by Francesco Bellina investigating, through encounters with fishermen on the ground, the struggles of small-scale fisheries and port communities across Trapani, Sicily, the Kerkennah Islands, Tunisia, and Jamestown, Accra, Ghana, as a result of global warming and, notably, of the exploitative action of large-scale industrial fishing on the local ecosystems. Coming himself from a family of fishermen, Bellina offers an intimate portrait inviting us to reconnect with the human dimension of the immense transformation we are assisting to. Although the fishermen of the Sicilian, Tunisian, and Ghanaian coasts are fundamentally rooted in their local economy and cultural identity, Pray for Seamen aims to shed light on the global dynamics and consequences that bound these three distinct geographies together and that directly concern all of us.
Project supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity by the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (2021)
“Pray for Seaman” exhibition by Francesco Bellina in now open at Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva, Palermo.
“Pray for Seamen is an artistic research project by Francesco Bellina and Stefano Liberti, curated by Izabela Moren, narrating the situation of the seas, the ports, and the small-scale fisheries in Tunisia, Ghana, and Sicily through encounters with fishermen on the ground.
Although the fishermen of the Sicilian, Tunisian, and Ghanaian coasts are a central component of the local economy and cultural identity, they are all exposed to the same global dynamics. Bellina gives us a diverse panorama of three landscapes by documenting their similar practices and struggles.”
The exhibition is open from 16 June to 24 September 2023
Winner of the 10th Edition of the Italian Council by the Italian Ministry of Culture. Produced by Fondazione Studio Rizoma, the final work will be acquired by the Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva in Palermo.
A satirical portrait of contemporary Italian politics by Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli
Supported by BASE Milano and Contemporary cluster.
Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli are the co-authors of Realpolitik, a photographic project of critical and satirical reflection on the iconography of communication and propaganda that characterizes Italy’s politics today. Since 2018, Santese and Valli are building a systematic and authorial documentation through a series of independent real-time publications on the main events and protagonists of the Italian political landscape.
The photographic project appeared in various national and international publications. Among those, it stands out a portrayal of the minister Matteo Salvini on the cover of the well known Time Magazine. Moreover, the project received extensive recognition across a series of experimental installations.
@Luca.Santese @Marco.P.Valli
@base_milano @contemporary_cluster
On June 4, 2023, the city of Naples officially celebrated the S.C.C. Naples’ victory in the Italian football championship 2023, an extraordinary event that last occurred with the ‘miracle’ of Diego Armando Maradona 33 years ago. On the very same day, June 4, Luca Santese & Marco P. Valli released Malatì, a photographic newspaper shot in Naples between April 29 and May 4, the week that marked the championship’ certain victory.
Neapolitans’ mad eternal love for their city and football team has not spared the two authors, who, possessed by the same holy Malatì (literal for ‘madness’, and title of a Naples’ TikTok hit song which now became the team’s anthem), try to give it back in this photographic volume rich in icons of the city, its history, and inhabitants. The latter are reinterpreted in a chaotic, extreme, reckless, and fleeing visual play—as a scooter speeding in the night through the neighborhoods’ alleys of Naples.
The cover’s photograph portrays a personalized cake realized for the two authors by a Neapolitan pastry chef; on the back side, the photographic volume ends with the cake’s left-overs surrounding the fragment of a Napaepolitan poem.
Printed in Italy, June 2023
Newsprint paper
25×35 cm / 9,8×13,7 in
40 pages, 50 photos
Rotogravure
All photographs shown in this publication were taken in Naples, Italy.
*the product may vary due to the printing process
MÜTTER exhibition by Luca Santese and curated by Nicola Patruno, will open at Jergon Studio (Berlin) from June 9th to August 31th, 2023.
The vernissage will take place on June 9 at 6 p.m. at JERGON Berlin, Wrangelstr. 76 – 10997
Mütter, Luca Santese’s first solo show in Germany is hosted and curated by JERGON, an art hub located in Berlin’s cultural heart of Kreuzberg. The space is dedicated to the promotion of experimental photography and a center for independent research. The exhibition itinerary unfolds in three spaces, each representing the constituent stages of Santese’s artist practice, which has been questioning the mimesis of the photographic image for 15 years by means of an ongoing comparison and association with archetypes and themes belonging to the history of classic and contemporary art. The artworks on display is drawn from the following series: “Found Photos in Detroit”, “Sado”, “Festa” and “Errors”, leading up to a metamorphic dialogue between abstraction and figuration, the historical and the archetypical, the realist and the visionary.
A5 double-sided artist notebook.
Each one comes with two different covers shot by Cesura’s photographers, 9 different notebooks to collect.
Softcover, Arena White Smooth 300gr
14,8×21 cm / 5,5×8,3 in
120 pages, Arena Ivory Smooth 90gr
Color Offset
Rounded corners
Printed in Italy, May 2021
CESURA FANZINE #4 is out. This year’s theme is “EARLY STAGE or how we started looking at things.” The publication brings together a selection of our collective members’ early works. Every image comes from the first images we took or the initial projects we developed. Each picture has been cropped to highlight the focus on the things that caught our attention at the beginning when photography was the most instinctive and pure act.
Inside the fanzine, you will find a poster of the collage inspired by this year’s theme.
Souvenir is a poetry collection divided into five sections.
Souvenir, from French “to come to mind”, evokes the ability to remember in a tangible way: distant thoughts in space and time that come in faces, objects, and places.
Lorenzo Cianchi’s poetic and photographic images, selected by CESURA collective, explore narrative duplicity to convey immediacy.
The five booklets, protected in a slipcase, remind us of the accordion-style folding postcards, that were very popular until a few years ago and can be read individually or as stages of human life. From birth to death, passing through youth and maturity: the childish levity, the preadolescence, the difficulty of deciphering desire, the sense of lack. Poetic words welcome photography; together, they become postcards from emotional places that dwell the human.
Poems on one side and photographs on the other: a eulogy to the anisotropic ways people feel, believing that literature – unlike reality – doesn’t necessarily need an end.
Edited by Boîte Editions and Cesura Publish.
First edition of 120 copies
Printed in Italy, November 2022
ISBN 9788894703818
Texts by Lorenzo Cianchi
Photos by Cesura
Translations by Federica Duani
Design by Valentina Bigaran
53,9 x 38,5 in / 13,7 x 9,8 cm
8 pages each booklet, 40 photos
All photographs shown in this publication were taken in Italy in the Summer of 2022 as the national election campaign unfolded.
In February 2014 Andy Rocchelli documented the protests in Kyiv that led to the Ukrainian revolution, also known as the Maidan revolution. Once back at Cesura headquarters, Andy realized a fanzine called Ukraina Revolution, which contains a sequence of photographs taken in those days in Maidan Square during the clashes. The fanzine, produced by Cesura Publish in the first edition of 50 copies, was then reprinted in a second edition, also in 2014.
Ukraina Revolution III, in its third edition, returns with a revised and expanded sequence of images.
We dedicate this third edition of Ukraina Revolution to our friends Andy Rocchelli and Andrei Mironov, who were killed by the Ukrainian army on May 24th, 2014, in Sloviansk while documenting the conditions of civilians trapped in the middle of the Donbas conflict.
This is a project promoted and supported by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.
Handbound softcover 27,0 X 41,0 cm
42 pages, 21 photos Digital print
Printed in Italy, May 2022
The project, commissioned by I Teatri di Reggio Emilia in collaboration with Collezione Maramotti, represents a photographic interpretation by Arianna Arcara of the Belgian dance theatre company Peeping Tom’s productions La Visita, site specific at Collezione Maramotti from November 4 to 7, 2021, and Triptych, staged at Teatro Valli in occasion of Festival Aperto 2021.
Arcara followed Peeping Tom’s creative process first at Collezione Maramotti, where they staged improvised performances that resulted in the site-specific production “La Visita,” to then move to the Teatro Municipale Valli to work on the acclaimed trilogy “The missing door, The lost room, and The hidden floor,” winner of the Fedora – Van Cleef & Arpels Prize for Ballet 2021.
The catalogue “A view of Peeping Tom’s la Visita/Triptych by Arianna Arcara” stands as one of the two project outcomes together with the homonymous exhibition on show during Fotografia Europea 2022, Reggio Emilia.
Curated by Arianna Arcara
Text by Silvia Bottani, Marinella Guatterini, Monica Poggi
Design by Arianna Arcara, Silvia Castagnoli
Translation by Johanna Bishop, Anna Carruthes
First edition
ISBN 9788894561173
Printed in Italy, Maggio 2022
Hardback
21×25 cm / 8,2×9,8 in
80 pages
303 photo
Offset
Promoted and supported by Fondazione I Teatri, Reggio Emilia, and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia.
Arianna Arcara and Claudio Majorana are part of the collective exhibition Coming of age at Fondation Louis Vuitton in honour of Virgil Abloh.
The exhibition will be open from today until April 27th.
“In 2019, Virgil Abloh curated a group exhibition titled “Coming of Age” in Los Angeles, California. Presented in creative partnership with Little Big Man Gallery, the exhibition centred around the concept, diversities and complexities of male youth and boyhood – traversing class, race, social economics, subcultures, isolation, and camaraderie. “Coming of Age” travelled to Paris, Beijing, Milan, New York, Munich, Tokyo and Seoul, allowing students, artists, and local communities access to a DIY “copy center”, to build and create their own zines with their favourite artworks from the exhibition.
A physical embodiment and homage to Virgil Abloh’s world, “Coming of Age” in Paris regroups, reimagines and expands this original exhibition and its narrative story. A tribute to a hands-on creator, the exhibition encourages activities and participation, combining physical events with digital activations. Visitors become participants, alongside artists, photographers, musicians, directors, and animators. Diverse but united, the participants serve as an illustration of Virgil Abloh’s mission and achievement to democratise the dream embodied by Louis Vuitton, rendering it a domain open to the aspirations of people from all walks of life, all ages, all genders and all races.”
Exhibition curated by Be Good Studios.
The jury of the Andy Rocchelli Grant gathered and is pleased to announce that THE YOSHIDA DORMITORY STUDENT’S HISTORY by Kanta Nomura is the winner of the first edition of our Grant.
We are extremely happy with the amount of titles and the high quality of dummies we received, reason why the jury decided to give two special mentions to Mikhail Bushkov with the project Zürich and to Angelo Vignali with the project How to raise a hand.
We want to thank all the participants and the jury for being part of this first edition of the Andy Rocchelli Grant.
2021 Jury
David Campany, Tamara Corm, Arianna Arcara and Lucia Rocchelli.
President of the Jury
Alex Majoli
The first edition of the grant is a project promoted and supported by Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo.
Scalandrê is a word from the regional dialect of Romagna, Italy, which means “out of season, out of phase”, referring to people, animals or plants. It is the title of the first book by Marco Zanella, a project carried out over three years in Cotignola, a small agricultural town in Northern Italy. It investigates what has often been defined as “the end of peasant civilization”, straddling the world before and after the pandemic.
The book tells of a local reality put to the test by the advance of the new digital society and by an alienating sense of time; a place where the natural rhythm of the seasons, festivals and rituals, that had always marked the life of a farming community, risks being upset and lost. In this small cosmos, life doesn’t seem to be running against time, but on a parallel track, without conflict.
Marco Zanella’s images bear witness to a community’s commitment to preserving ancient traditions and collective memories from accelerated change.
Curated and Edited by Alex Majoli and Arianna Arcara
Design by Alberto Bolzonetti / Muttnik
Softcover, Federigoni Arena Paper
24×32 cm / 13 x 10 in
104 pages, 58 photos
Offset
First edition
ISBN 978-88-945611-4-2
Printed in Italy, July 2021
“Whatever is the story of my adopted family and of a dream we shared with thousands of kids like us: to live in a world where rules or constrictions didn’t exist.”
“I was a teenager looking for adventures and freedom who found herself in the midst of the declining golden age of the rave movement, with a camera hanging around my neck. At that time, no one saw any good in us or in what we were doing, just as no one even bothered to look into rave culture. I remember the looks filled with disgust and judgment that followed us everywhere, and how we just learned not to give a damn, because we believed in our dreams and the alternative life we were pursuing. Looking back to this project after years, I can’t deny that it was the freest and fullest time of my life; but that fairytale was saturated with asphalt, mud, dust and rich in enemies, and soon our teenage dream crashed into a wall. Surely, we allowed ourselves to be fascinated by the unknown, and learned to find the strength to express all that we are, so that nobody and nothing could stop us from pursuing our dreams, whatever they may be.”
Curated by Arianna Arcara and Alex Majoli
Graphic design by Studio Moretti Visani
Hardback, handmade silver spray*
28×28 cm / 11×11 in
96 pages, 54 photos
Offset
A5 Xerox zine on fluo paper included
First edition
*cover design may vary
“Theatricality must restore and cross over from side to side, existence and flesh.” Antonin Artaud
With SCENE, Alex Majoli has generated new interpretations about the relationship between men and their daily theatricality. In Opera Aperta, the author takes up the previously developed discourse and exasperates the ambiguity between reality and fiction – “In February 2020, I was in Reggio Emilia, where I was working on a new chapter of my SCENE project, my long-term photographic research about the theatricality of everyday life. While I was searching for new turning points, the pandemic started insinuating itself in my photos; on March 8th, I decided to interrupt the project to photograph the situation in the country. After over a year, I picked the story up again. Opera Aperta is the result of this work; not just photography, but an open paragraph on the contemporary tragedy of Covid-19.”
30×40 cm / 12×16 in
128 pages, 76 photos
Offset
First edition
ISBN 978-88-945611-1-1
Printed in Italy, May 2021
Since the day our group came together under the name of CESURA, the people who believed in our project and mission made a huge difference helping us reach our goals. With the SUPPORT US campaign we ask for your help to directly support our projects, our independent Publishing house and our Lab.
You can choose among 3 annual plans with different benefits like a web studio visit of CESURA’s headquarters with one of our members and gadgets (artist notebook with some of our photographers’ pictures on the cover, an original clipper lighter and a cotton tote bag, both with our Never never never give up motto). You can also choose between a signed Open edition print or a 30-minute One to One session to have a chat with a photographer of your choice. Last but not least, a limited edition poster made by the one and only Paolo Ventura!
Artist Paolo Ventura opens our SUPPORT US campaign with a unique work donated and created exclusively for CESURA. The artwork is the result of a combination of acrylic colors and stencils on wrapping paper 140 x 100 cm and is inspired by our motto NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP.
This collaboration, in which the Milanese artist was given complete freedom, is the first of a series of special works created by various international artists.
Ventura’s reproduction is printed on Arctic Volume White 200gr paper format, size 68 x 98cm, and is in a limited edition.
Find this special poster inside 2 of our memberships.