The authors
We present the authors who will be exhibited in the Festival’s first edition.
Fabian Albertini
Fabian Albertini (b.1965) is an Italian artist based between Reggio Emilia and Rio de Janeiro. Albertini is guided by her interests in perception, movement, the relationship between man and environment through dialogues between art and spirituality. Combining photography, installation and overpainted photographs, her projects often show fieldwork in remote locations – such as deserts, volcanos and rainforest. In her early work she has explored the complex of consciousness creating performances interpreted by contemporary dancers inside the environment, publishing five books on this theme from 2000 to 2010.
Gabriele Cecconi
Gabriele Cecconi is an Italian documentary photographer interested in cultural, political and environmental issues. He approached photography after a law degree and in 2015 he was selected by Camera Torino and Leica for a masterclass with the Magnum photographer: Alex Webb. Since then he has made several reportages until 2018, when he began to work on long-term projects. His project on the Rohingya migration’s environmental consequences in southern Bangladesh has received numerous international awards including the Yves Rocher Photography Award at Visa pour l’Image, POY, Andrei Stenin Grand Prix, PX3 Photographer of the Year and the LUMIX Sustainability Award among others. His work has been exhibited internationally in museums, festivals and galleries including the State Hermitage Museum, United Nations’s headquarters, Photo Vogue Festival, Festival of Ethical Photography and has been published by Italian and international newspapers including the Espresso, National Geographic, Internazionale, Newsweek and Courrier international. At the same time he carries out research on the relationship between culture, power and representation and on visual arts’s spiritual and pedagogical aspects.
Giacomo d’Orlando
Giacomo d’Orlando (1990) is a self-taught documentary photographer born in Italy. He began career as an advertising photographer until he decided to move to Nepal and then Peru in order to enter the world of photojournalism, working alongside several local NGOs and focusing mainly on social issues. After this experience he lived in both Australia and New Zealand. This inspired him to concentrate on the environment, with particular attention to the possible future scenarios caused by climate change. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The Washington Post, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Geo France, De Volkskrant, D-La Repubblica, Mare Magazin, Vice, FQMillennium among others and exposed worldwide in photographic festivals and galleries. Today his work looks at how the increasing pressures brought about by climate change are reshaping the planet and how present-day society is reacting to the new challenges that will characterize our future.
Alex Urso
Alex Urso (b. 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan. He works predominantly in the medium of collage, assemblage and spacial installation. His works have been exhibited in public and private art spaces such as Casa Testori (Milan), Fondazione Brugnatelli (Milan), Spazju Kreattiv (Valletta), Magacin Cultural Center (Belgrade), Italian Institute of Culture of Krakow, Spazio Meme (Carpi), Monopol Gallery (Warsaw), Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art (London), Entropia Gallery (Wroclaw), Palazzo Malipiero (Venice). Together with his practice as visual artist, Urso is as well engaged in curatorial projects and critical writing. He has been collaborating with several art spaces and institutions, such as the National Gallery of Art–Zachęta, Italian Cultural Institute of Warsaw, Polish pavilion at the 16. International Architecture Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia, Fondazione Benetton, Adam Mickiewicz Institute. In 2017 Urso was co-curator of the Biennale de La Biche – the smallest art biennale in the world. He is currently editor of the art magazines Artribune and Sky Arte.
Misha Vallejo
Misha Vallejo Prut is an Ecuadorian-Israeli visual artist and audio-visual storyteller whose work lies in the border between documentary and art. His main interests lie in the portrayal of the lost person and the lost place with a special emphasis in environmental issues, as well as the banal everyday life of Latin American communities. He has an MA in Documentary Photography from the University of the Arts London. His photobooks Al otro lado (Editora Madalena, Sao Paulo 2016), Siete punto Ocho (RM, Barcelona 2018) and Secreto Sarayaku (RM, Barcelona 2020) have received several international awards in Latin America, the US and Europe. His photographic work has also been shown in those geographic locations, a highlight of which are his participations at the Biennale Für Aktuelle Fotografie 2022 (Germany), at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles in 2018 (France) and at the First Latin American Foto Festival at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York, 2018. In 2020 he released his first interactive web documentary at www.secretsarayaku.net, which has been well received by the international community with more than 12000 visits (and counting). Among others, he has won the Goethe Institut and Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Artistic Response for Environmental Change (Germany & Netherlands, 2019), the Photo Europe Network Prize at the PhotOn Festival in Valencia (Spain, 2018) and the Ecuadorian National Arts Prize Mariano Aguilera (2015). His work has been exhibited in galleries, cultural centres and festivals around the world and has been published in such media like The New York Times, The Washington Post, VICE, GEO, Marie Claire and others. Nowadays he is based in Ecuador and is working on his first feature documentary film Light Memories.
Marco Zorzanello
Marco Zorzanello is a documentary photographer born in Vicenza in 1979. After a degree in Archeology at the Cà Foscari University of Venice and some years of field work as an archaeologist, he dedicated himself to the study of reportage photography with a diploma from the John Kaverdash Institute in Milan and a specialization course promoted and organized by the MoMA of New York. Since the end of 2015 he has directed his photographic investigation to the theme of climate change, in particular its effects on the tourism industry. With the long-term project “Tourism in the climate change era” he has collaborated with all the main magazines of the Italian publishing scene and obtained many international reconizations, publishing with major global media, such as Time, National Geographic, New York Time, Newsweek Japan and many others. This work has been awarded by the ’Yves Rocher Photography Awards and by the 6mois prize pour photojournalisme, as well as exhibited in some of the main photographic festivals on the European scene. Since 2020 he has been collaborating with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the MuFoCo for the creation of the 1900s Italian Atlas of Architecture.