Scarlat’s work has been recognised and awarded in several national and international competitions, such as PHotoEspaña, the Emerging Photographer Fund (Magnum Foundation), World Nomads, Promoción del Arte at Tabacalera Cantera, Visa pour l’image, Matera European Photography, Artistas Novos, and Creación Injuve. In 2021 he received a bookmaking scholarship at Magnum Photos. This year he also has received a long-term mentorship scholarship at Magnum Photos, and he is currently working with Gregory Halpern and Alessandra Sanguinetti for this project.
Scarlat has always been interested in working with his family from Romania. After leaving in 2005 at the age of 11 and having spent 15 years away, his relationship with them has changed. In his projects, he like to insist on those tensions and conflicts that have arisen as a result of moving to Spain. He is interested in Eastern Europe, Romania, alcoholics, his mother, religion, death, the traces of communism on people's faces, gypsies, children, the cemetery, the lake, wedding dresses, unmarried women, dead girls in wedding dresses, dead horses, boys playing soccer, abandoned dogs, funerals, weddings, enchantments, women who are going to clean the graves in the cemetery, flowers, gold…
Laura San Segundo (b. 1990) studied Fine Arts at Madrid’s Complutense University, followed by an MA at Efti International School of Photography and Cinema. Her personal projects have since run alongside commissioned work and a series of teaching roles. A recipient of various scholarships and residencies, Segundo’s projects have been exhibited internationally. With a playful but thoughtful methodology, her work makes conceptual connections between different image types, exploring their many layers of meaning – and how their meaning can be altered by visual strategies like cropping, fragmenting and decontextualising.
Uzochukwu has previously exhibited at Bozar (BE), Lagos Photo Festival (NG), Off Biennale Dakar (SN), Photo Vogue Festival (IT), and Unseen Amsterdam (NL). He currently studies philosophy in Berlin.
Her aim is to make the spectator observe and to be observed at the same time. While we watch others, we are being watched too. The desire of observing one another, of having insight into the lives of others posits a system of norms based on which we define ourselves compared to others. We want to confirm that we have similar problems as others, that we are better than or just as good as they are. In other words, that we only deviate from the average on an average scale.
Her works explore how we can describe our body in the most objective manner possible, to represent it without any intimacy whatsoever. Looking at these so-called anti-intimate states, the works examine all the subtle and complex relationships our physical extension forms with our environment, and how social expectations shape our appearance. Personal stories and critical observations regarding the body are represented along with abstract objects and intertwined sculptural bodies. Her fundamental medium is photography that she often combines with other disciplines, such as objects, photobooks or video.
Arno Brignon (b. 1976) lives and works in Toulouse. With a background as an educator in underprivileged neighbourhoods, he later devoted himself fully to photography, joining the Signatures agency in 2013. Brignon’s work questions the place of man in the world, exploring ideas of territory and memory through a poetic photographic approach. He divides his time between teaching, residency programmes, personal research and assignments for various media outlets. Brignon’s images are regularly exhibited both domestically and internationally, whilst his works is found in a series of private and public collections. Thus far, he has published four books Ancrages, D'après une histoire vraie, La formacion de las olas, and Terre et Territoire #1.
arno-brignon.fr
@arnobrignon
In the last five years he has been working extensively in the valley of Kashmir, India, at first documenting the political conflict between the population and the Indian administration, and later trying to explore a more personal and oneiric approach to the issue. In 2020 Camillo was one of the selected artist for the FOAM Talent.Among the prizes received are Shortlist at PH Museum Grant, Best Rising Talent at Gomma Grant, Alexia Foundation Student Grant, LensCulture B&W, Shortlist Unseen Dummy Award, Fotoleggendo Award.
Camillo’s photographs has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Europe, USA, Asia, Oceania and published in Time, Der Spiegel, Polka, National Geographic, Internazionale, BuzzFeed, Mashable, Vanity Fair and many other international publications.
Nicola Di Giorgio (b. 1994) graduated in Graphic Design from the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, continuing his studies in Photography at the ISIA in Urbino. With an interdisciplinary approach, his research focuses on the landscape; he investigates contemporary society from scientific, socio-cultural and formal perspectives to identify various correlations between art and science. He combines these methodologies with collecting as an artistic and taxonomic research practice. In 2022, Di Giorgio received the Graziadei Prize for Photography, in co-production with the MAXXI - National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome. Since 2023, he has worked as a professor at NABA-New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. His works are found in several public and private collections.
www.nicoladigiorgio.com
@nicoladigiorgio_
The Land of Promises is an invitation to explore transnational and transracial adoption in China and Belgium, both in the present day and in the past. One can imagine that during China’s one-child policy era Belgium represented “the promised land” for baby girls whose parents had to give them up. And yet, as Youqine Lefèvre’s work unfolds, and she moves from her parents’ archives to her own images, the perspective shifts. When she visits her birth country, China becomes the land of promises — of finding her roots? Her birth family? Herself?
Such an ambitious promise is easy to break, which explains the palpable melancholy in Youqine Lefèvre’s pictures. Her work also conveys the ambiguity of her position: as an adult adoptee visiting her birth country, she is “an outsider within”, so close to her photographic subjects and yet so far away. From this perspective, art is the new land of promises for Lefèvre, who uses multiple supports (film, paper, etc.) in her photographic practice to create a world where she can live her truths. The work produced by the artist thus generates the artist. Youqine Lefèvre is not only reclaiming her own narrative, but challenging the status of archives that in her hands become both art and a political statement.
Ultimately, The Land of Promises is an invitation to decentre whiteness and the Global North in the visual narrative surrounding transnational and transracial adoption.
- Text by Amandine Gay (.TIFF)
Petra Slobodnjak is an artist from Croatia who graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, studying graphic product design, in Zagreb in 2012. Since 2014, Petra has been working as a freelance graphic designer and photographer. She is a Croatian Freelance Artist Association member and has exhibited her work regularly since 2008. For work DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7, she received the Ivan Kožarić award for the best young artist, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City of Zagreb (in 2022) and award for the Best Young Artist in 2022 awarded by the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts. The mentioned work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art collection in Zagreb. Her artistic work intertwined with her personal life, examining the boundaries between these two aspects. She explores the dynamics of society in her works, emphasizing personal responsibility in shaping the environment. Through artistic expression, she fosters awareness of an individual’s impact on broader societal changes, encouraging reflection on one’s actions and relationship to the surroundings. She is currently based in Zagreb.
Born in 1991 in Willemstad, Curaçao
Lives and Works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gilleam Trapenberg (1991, Willemstad, Curaçao) moved to the Netherlands at the age of nineteen and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2017. He participated in multiple group exhibitions, such as In The Presence of Absence at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020). In 2017 he published his first photo book Big Papi and in 2018 he was one of the nominees for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He’s the fourth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis grant (2020). His first solo exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam opened in 2021. Gilleam Trapenberg lives and works in Amsterdam. Through his work, Trapenberg reflects on the contradictions that are part of the social landscape in Curaçao, were the idea of a utopian paradise is diametrically opposed to the realities of post-colonialism and tourism. He explores stereotypes and tropes that have manifested themselves through social culture and the Western media.
Pleun Gremmen (NL, 1992) is an artist and designer researching ways to create narratives through a variety of media reflecting mainly on internet subculture and politics while pushing the boundaries of her practice.
She graduated in 2018 from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (Master Media Design, Experimental Publishing), and in 2014 from ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (Bachelor Graphic Design). Since graduating in Arnhem she has been freelancing as an artist, designer and researcher and has been connecting and collaborating with artists and institutions in Rotterdam.
The work “Alt Reality Lexicon” (2018) explores the language neologisms of the Alt-right and Manosphere subcultures, acting as a translator between realms of reality. The performance installation “R.E.S.T”(2017) explores contemporary physical and digital expressions of escapism in a politically turbulent time.
Renée Lorie lives and works in Brussel. She graduated in art history, filmstudies and photography.
Renée captures the light, she show her experience of the world around her. It’s a world full of contrasts. Her images show disharmony, memories in nowadays. Vulnerability, white against deep black backgrounds, day and night, emptiness and fullness. Coolness and heat, burning ice. The present and the absent. She’s looking for attachment, but displacement too. Themes are the mystery, the uncanny, abjection and the enigmatic. Creaking discomfort in down, a sensory touch in a flat image. She shows a glimpse, an error, disturbance, the lyrical. She’s showing distance, yet close framing. She uses the dark room, groping for light. Light traversing trees and water, that lives on the tide during spring tide. Everything is strange, yet daily and known. Trees, water, horse and dew, rustle, a man in a suit, sand mountains and a statue. She’s look around, capturing an image and imagining immediately another image, a walking écriture automatique, a photo novel, a same story. She likes to see the past in the present.
Her works have been on exhibition widely in Finland and abroad. Her photobook won the Nordic Dummy Award 2013 –and was published by Kehrer Verlag with a title When the Sense of Belonging is Bound to a System of Movement in 2014. In 2014 Savolainen was a nominee of Fotofinlandia prize. She is also a founder of Maanantai-collective.
She is an artist who is not only interested in photographic work, but also the installations and the space are additional elements that enrich her projects. Her approaches are conceived from various perspectives through the handling of different objects and languages and works from photographic concepts by themselves, such the light, but she extrapolates it into a more abstract proposals, that why it makes her so interesting for us.
Alice Pallot is a French photographer who lives and works in Brussels. She graduated with honors from the photography section of ENSAV La Cambre (BA and MA) In July 2018 and participated in the Erasmus program at Ecal in Switzerland. In the same year, she won the Roger de Conynck prize for her series L’Ile Himero, also exhibited at The Voies Off Festival in the context of Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.In 2019, Alice Pallot self-edited a book untitled Land which was included in Belgian Photobook at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, Le Bal in Paris and at the Wiels Art Book Fair in Brussels. Her photographic series Oasis was included in the 4th edition of the PhotoBrussels Festival 2019 at Hangar Art Center. This body of work was also shown in collaboration with the Satellite Gallery at En Piste ! in Liège and in Dans quel monde rêvons-nous ? curated by the collectif Xeno at Bozar in Brussels. Alice Pallot’s work was included in several places in Brussels, such as Le Botanique, Gallery Été 78, Adaventura, Vertigo Gallery, La Réserve and La Vallée. She also exhibited in France; in Paris, at Immix Gallery, N’Oblige Gallery and in Dieppe at the Diep-Haven Festival.In 2020, she presented with the Gallery Satellite a new display of L’Île Himero - accompanied with a book edited by Page Works - at the Biennale de L’Image Possible in Liège. Laureate of the PhotoBrussels Festival 05, Alice Pallot presented a new series; Suillus, part of the exhibition «The World Within» at Hangar Art Center in 2021.In September 2021, she presented her Suillus series at the Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam, with Hangar Gallery. In january 2022, Suillus was presented in La Caserne and at Immix Galerie in Paris. Alice Pallot has been published in Libération, La Libre, Fisheye Magazine, Vice and others.
After having displayed her work for the first time at Plat(t)form 2015, held at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur (Switzerland), she was asked to display her work on the occasion of the Fotopub Festival in Novo Mesto (Slovenia) and at Circulation(s) in Paris. In 2015, she was shortlisted for the Francesco Fabbri Prize for her work Lay Out. Over the last year and a half, she has concentrated exclusively on her own personal research, focusing on the creation of new series and projects. Se has been selected for Fotografia Europea 2017. Since 2016 she has been represented by Viasaterna.
A common thread throughout his practice is an interest in the metaphorical potential of photographs. His project, ‘John’s Notebooks’ (2020-2021), pulls on the symbolism present with the landscape of the home to touch on the emotions and memories connected to the childhood loss of his father. Whereas his most recent work ‘Murmurations’ (2020-21), employs the starling murmuration as a symbol to reflect on the current global crisis and the act of coming together and converging as a group.
Barraclough is a recent graduate of the MA Photography programme at Bristol UWE and is due to exhibit his master’s project, ‘John’s Notebooks’, at the 2021 Bristol Photo Festival.
Ieva Raudsepa (b. 1992, Latvia) holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Latvia and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been featured in i-D, The Guardian, Wallpaper, It’s Nice That, the Latvian Photography Yearbook, and elsewhere. Her series Cruise was part of the exhibition MIXTAPE at the Riga Photomonth 2016, while the book dummy was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award 2016, Amsterdam, and is now released by Milda Books. In Spring 2018 her work was part of Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe at the Calvert 22 Foundation, London. Her exhibition It Could Just Swallow You Up at the ISSP Gallery in Riga opened July 2019.
Alessandro Zoboli (b. 1990) graduated from the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia in 2014. Between 2015 and 2019 he worked in Alex Majoli’s studio as an assistant, refining his skills as a photographer, printer and retoucher. In 2019 he joined Cesura Agency as an official member. Over the past years he has worked on a number of different long-term projects exploring the relationship between North Africa and Europe. Zoboli has also documented the Covid-19 pandemic and housing crisis in Italy; travelling the country from North to South, he photographs the conditions of inequality that characterise western societies, highlighting the forgotten discomfort experienced by millions of families. His ongoing Shine On project explores the multifaceted and elusive face of today’s Britain: a liquid form, constantly changing and contradicting itself in search of a new identity.
Giaime Meloni is a visual researcher with a PhD in Architecture, currently living between two islands: Île-de-France and Sardinia. The aim of his work is to explore the role of the photography as a sensible instrument to narrate the space complexity. His researches has been published in various publications (MAM Saint Etienne, INTRU). In 2017, he was shortlisted for Premio Graziadei with his long-term project Das Unheimiliche. He teaches photography as an instrument of the making of the architectural design between France and Italy.
My practice is conceived as an act capable of questioning the nature of places.
The images provide a tangible proof of my presence in the territory, in a certain way they documented it. However I would like to take distance compared to the documentation – and strictly documentary photography – in order to provide a more universal reflection on our relationship with the space.
The photographic action that I develop aims to questioning the restitution of ordinary space in search of a visual and spatial connection with the subject. The specific interest of this practice is to investigate, by theory and practice, the photographic instantaneity and the message that it carries.
The paradox of images is that they pretends to reproduce things which are only themselves. But this is only an illusion, a conviction that is a part of the magic contemplation. In fact, during the act of photographing, I realize that things denying their existence by the image.
What it remains frozen into the fragments is the (artificial) reflection of reality as an intention of my gaze.
Every photos prove that there is an implicit message exceeding the limits of the image itself. I accept that the message of the images can be corrupted / destroyed at any time by the viewer / reader.
www.giaimemeloni.com
Felipe Romero Beltrán (B.1992. Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian photographer based in Madrid, Spain. In 2010, He earned a scholarship in Argentina and moved to Buenos Aires to study Photography. By that time, he had developed an interest in documentary photography and traveled many times abroad for his projects. Years later, in 2016, he moved to Madrid, Spain. He got a MFA degree in photography.
Felipe focuses on social issues, dealing with the tension that new narratives introduce in the field of documentary photography. At the same time, He is currently preparing a Phd dissertation on documentary photography at Complutense University of Madrid. His practice, characterized by its interest on social matters, is the result of long-term projects accompanied by extensive research on the subject.
Her practice works with photography, collage and installation, often experiments with the medium. She mainly explores topics of identity, personal freedom and systems of oppressions. In her life and work, she questions existing rules and binding canons. Sejud’s main inspirations are daily life, vulgarity, ugliness, dreams and visions.