Images of Italy

Rosanna D’Ortona, Francesca Magistro, Luisa Zanzani

On September 15, 2019, the exhibition “Images of Italy” by Fotoraum Köln e.V. opens in Dortmund, for which we, DOMiD, have taken over the patronage. The exhibition runs until the 27th of Otkober 2019. On the occasion of the Photoszene 2018, the Cologne-based photographers Rosanna D'Ortona, Francesca Magistro and Luisa Zanzani are showing works on the subject of their common Italian origin.

Perspectives of the artists

Magistro uses the family archive to research the way how she photographs her own family today. Zanzani's work is dedicated to her region of origin Emilia-Romagna, which she left over 10 years ago and that she is now rediscovering. D’Ortona belongs to the first generation of “guest worker children” and knows her parents' country, only idealized, through vacations and stories.

Memory images

Based on their own relationships with Italy and their respective migration stories, that take place between Germany and Italy, Francesca Magistro, Rosanna D'Ortona and Luisa Zanzani work in a motivic way and overlay those small (in the sense of a minority story), quiet and magically barren pictures of Italy, that they track down in their families' collective memories. (...)

Their stories give insides, and are touching "unspectacular" meditations - a search for traces between proximity and distance, between longing and defense, a search for an own constitution, based on the experience of migration. (...)

Memory images embedded in the female gaze appear, within which different temporalities and spaces between Italy and Germany blend into one another, and which open up a third space while questioning the unspectacular of everyday life with the camera. Poetic miniatures emerge, that go far beyond an autobiographical archeology and play around the transcendental of every existence. Magical, powerful and touching.

Text by Aurora Rodonò, that will speak at the vernissage.

The artists are part of the Fotoraum Köln e.V., exhibition platform for contemporary photography and part of the independent art scene in Cologne since 2002.