University of Brighton, Wilmot Gallery, Ground Floor - 154-155 Edward St, Kemptown, Brighton BN2 0JG
Explore the works of 5 emerging talents selected by Photoworks from the annual Luigi Ghirri Emerging Talent Award, Italy, presented in the festival in partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute.
The Dowry of Latera
Daniele Cimaglia & Giuseppe Odore
The inhabitants of Latera, where until the 1950s the cultivation of cannabis sativa for textile fiber production was central to the local economy, took part in a participatory art project. Many families still preserve handwoven fabrics passed down through generations. We asked the residents to donate some of these often unused textiles and collected stories related to the tradition of the dowry: the linen set that parents gave to their daughter for her wedding. The processing of hemp required collective organization. After harvesting, it was buried in the shores of the lake to macerate, transformed into fibers, and given to weavers.
The collected stories testify to the importance of these fabrics as symbols of care, shared labor, and sustenance.
The final artwork is a large sheet made by sewing together the donated fabrics, decorated with cyanotype prints that reconstruct a photograph of the seamstresses from the 1950s. This work pays tribute to the community of Latera and its traditions, highlighting how knowledge from the past can inspire solutions to contemporary challenges, such as pollution caused by the textile industry and fast fashion. Hemp, grown using natural methods, is a sustainable fiber that requires less water than cotton and promotes a circular economy. Traditions like those of Latera offer more ethical production models capable of healing the relationship between humans and the environment.
Project featured in Giovane Fotografia Italiana #12 | UNIRE / BRIDGING
You Never Came Back
Serena Radicioli
Two people died that night, one of them was my father. I never knew what his real job was. On the night of the incident, I was waiting for him, but he never came home. I considered it normal not to see him return for a long time, just as I considered it normal to skip school to visit a prison and find him there. My father’s death was sudden and my family never talks about what happened. Even at the time it was never talked about. I grew up with many questions about him until ten years later I started to do research and explore the facts. I searched his records, found files, photos, letters from prison, and reconnected with people who bring back his memory.
The project combines images from the public and family archives and pictures of my personal memories taken in the present. Non sei più tornato (You never came back) is a collection of memories, events and facts that reveal through the eyes of a little girl the life choices of a father who was killed. It is a project that speaks of the end of a wait, but also of a broken hope, transformed into an unbridgeable emptiness that asks to be chasing. My father never came home, that is the centre of my project.
Project featured in Giovane Fotografia Italiana #12 | UNIRE / BRIDGING
Milk, Weight, Gravity
Anie Maki
Milk, Weight, Gravity reconstructs a family narrative that simultaneously conceals and reveals ancestral psychological dynamics. It tells the story of a genetic depression, highlighted by a series of suicides, that reappears like a ghost in the author’s life, just like family albums: a chaos of voices, faces, and stories to be listened to, understood, and reworked.
The author presents a vast panorama of characters, difficult lives, deaths, places, and connections, reconstructing her own family tree and committing her thoughts to paper. A cathartic puzzle that tears apart the elegant silence that has surrounded nearly a century of family stories. Secrecy, born as protection, ends up generating the opposite effect: an existential curse passed down to the present. The photographs delve into psychic heritage in search of answers. The traces left by ancestors, like patterns across generations, speak and manifest again. Family secrets, which have acted like supernatural forces fueling cycles of suffering and coincidences, are finally unmasked, made visible, shared, and healed. Milk, Weight, Gravity is an intimate stream of consciousness, an act of retroactive healing, a coming to terms with reality.
Collages and photographs create a process of connection between generations, from ancestors to the author, in search of an understanding and acceptance of the past that sheds new light on the present, but also on the future.
Project originally presented within the Young Italian Photography #13 – Voices
The Equator Festival
Rosa Lacavalla
An attempt to repair a piece of sky that unfolds over an ocean of memories. Solid yet weightless, the images float, carrying fragments of histories and cultures in constant flux. The Equator Festival is an initiatory journey, a crossing of borders, an invitation to immerse yourself in a flow of transformation. An intimate fresco of a distant past, of family stories intertwined with contemporary narratives.
At the same time, it becomes a metaphor for humanity’s search for a common ground, which turns out to be that imaginary line that simultaneously divides and unites, creating familiar constellations from one hemisphere to the other. Past and present, reality and dream merge, projecting us toward a future yet to be written, while the stars sing from the deep blue of eternity to the soul of the ocean.
Project featured in Giovane Fotografia Italiana #12 | UNIRE / BRIDGING