As a partner of the Luigi Ghirri Award, Photoworks is offering two photographers with an ecological focus a one-week artists residency at Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire. Dalby Forest and Photoworks are collaborating on this residency, with Dalby Forest hosting the artists and Photoworks providing mentoring and networking opportunities. Dalby Forest has a rich history of working with artists who have used the history and the landscape of the forest as creative inspiration for residencies, installations, workshops and sculpture. In the heart of 8,500 hectares of woodland is our residency accommodation, consisting of basic bathroom and kitchen facilities, a living area and four bedrooms. The location is remote but full of breath-taking views by day, and by night designated as a Dark Skies Discovery Site.
Open Call GFI#11 | Luigi Ghirri Award 2024
GFI | Premio Luigi Ghirri (Young Italian Photography | Luigi Ghirri Award) is a free-of-charge opportunity for artists under 35 that promotes and showcases emerging photography talents in Italy. An international commission selects the works produced and shown in a group exhibition at Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia as part of the European Photography Festival. Artists should submit a project fitting the theme ‘Contaminations’, including images with descriptions and install proposals.
Candidates must be Italian or foreigners living in Italy to be considered for the contest. Artists and collectives can submit one project.
Artists selected in the last three call editions (2021, 2022, 2023) should not apply.
The Theme: Contaminations
Modern thought is questioning the anthropocentric paradigm of recent centuries due to the climate emergency. We are losing the idea that nature is a space of otherness made for humans, a pristine place of goodness and beauty, a refuge to escape, or a resource to exploit and adapt. What is emerging, however, is the notion that nature does not exist as a biologically determined primordial condition and that the entire planet is the result of a transformative process carried out by many subjects, each of whom should be acknowledged as having configurative ability and will. If “the planet is an enormous and collective garden where we cultivate each other” (Emanuele Coccia), can the contemporary image show new possible interactions between humans (as individuals, communities, and species) and the rest of the living beings based on relations that do not rely on superiority and domination, but rather on exploring intermediate areas, zones of contamination, and mutual transformation? Are there images that can help us move beyond the binary reductionism of city and nature, control and anarchy, the normal and the different, the useful and the useless, taking us to the intermediate space where things are ambiguous, uncertain, shifting and differing?
How to enter
Click Apply now in the button below.
Upload all the required material, including:
- selection of images (minimum 5 – maximum 15, 1500 px on the long edge);
- project description, in Italian and English, including any links to videos, with up to 2000 characters for each language;
- CV with up to 2000 characters;
- biography with up to 1500 characters;
- consent forms (in Italian or English) undersigned by the portrayed subjects if recognizable;
- sketchwork and/or description of a set-up proposal, assumed on a wall not exceeding 9 metres in length.
Selection Jury
The 7 finalists will be selected by a jury composed of:
- Julia Bunnemann / Photoworks Festival, Brighton
- Ilaria Campioli / Giovane Fotografia Italiana, Reggio Emilia
- Krzysztof Candrowicz / Fotofestiwal, Łódź, Poland
- Daniele De Luigi / Giovane Fotografia Italiana, Reggio Emilia
- Lisanne van Happen / Fotodok, Utrecht
