Congratulations to the winners!

On 15 May at the fsmgallery, Florence, Italy, during exhibition of the 10 projects selected by Giovanna Calvenzi, Daniele De Luigi and George Tatge, the curator of beyondmemory, Marinella Paderni, chose the 3 winning projects:

Comments by Marinella Paderni:

First prize to the Chilean artist Enrique Ramirez for his video ‘Brises’, which synthesizes  autobiographical and collective memories sedimented in the places portrayed in the video, and links the political and social history of his country with the urban landscape, which in his work becomes the bearer of the hidden stream between the past (removed, and as yet not fully elaborated) and the present.

Second prize to the Italian collective Fotoromanzo Italiano  for their work eponymous work ‘fotoromanzoitaliano.it (Italian picture story)' which reflects on the active role of archive use in relation to the production of collective memory; for having analyzed Italy’s image in its recent history; for the way in which they renew photographic language through the reinvention of an obsolete device - the picture story.

Third prize to the Italian artist Claudio Gobbi for his photographic work ‘Armenie Ville’ in which he analyzes landscape’s history connected to its future possibilities, in this case Armenia, through the development of the concept of photographic documentation in relation to issues of ‘archive fever’ in contemporary art.

View the 10 projects chosen by Giovanna Calvenzi, Daniele De Luigi and George Tatge which will be exhibited at the Fondazione Marangoni in Florence, 15 May to 12 June.

'beyondmemory' is an open call which invited artists to reflect on contemporary photography and video’s role in perceiving history and collective memory. Artists prepared and submitted their projects between November 2011 and February 2012. The call is based on an idea suggested by the curator Marinella Paderni, and is a collaboration between Fondazione Studio Marangoni and Celeste Network.

Theme
Memory has been for centuries a community’s natural repository of symbolic and mythical meaning; a combination of true stories and fantastical representations, which mixed, history with poetry, reality with art, artistic conjecture with collective unconscious, the universal with the singular. With the end of dogmas and grand ideological narratives, memory is no longer a producer of myths, rather it survives as the basis for a search of truth, taking up the role of instrument of knowledge, of historical production and verification of information. The idea that memory is repository of a single, absolute truth, has been replaced in our information age by the notion of many memories: micro-truths without universal authenticity which act on the knowledge and production of history. In particular, according to Michel Foucault’s view, photography has given birth to the idea of archive as a repository of memory and a fundamental building-block of the present.

"beyondmemory" reflects on photography and video’s role in the perception of history and collective memory, with particular attention given to the importance of archives and photographic documents in artistic research – a cultural phenomenon which the philosopher Jacques Derrida called “le mal d’archive.”

Archive fever is one of contemporary art’s principal themes. Photography provides another viewpoint on history, revealing misunderstood or possible ‘truths’, transforming traces of information and documents into visual monuments of our time, often creating their own devices and taking up other languages of expression. Works submitted to beyondmemory can contain images as clues for paradigms, textual elements, photographic installations with archive material, sound fragments, the use of photographs which are simply found or tell a common story, are some of the forms adopted by contemporary photography to give images various levels of significance to history and collective memory.