bab magazine | contemporary views of landscape | issue 03 _ A PLACE TO LIVE

is selected for the Photobook Exhibition at Athens Photo Festival,

13 June – 28 July 2019 | Benaki Museum / Pireos138

In recognition of the increasing importance of the role of the photobook in contemporary visual culture, Athens Photo Festival will present once again an exhibition dedicated to the form of book. The Festival features a selection of over 200+ new photobooks from all over the world, including photobooks independently or commercially published and distributed, handmade, self-published, book dummies, exhibition catalogues, zines and limited edition photography books, etc.

Athens Photo Festival is the leading international festival of photography and visual culture in Southeastern Europe, and one of the five oldest of its kind in the world.

The Festival seeks to bring together emerging and established artists and photographers from around the world with the aim to reflect the diversity of photography and visual culture today. Through its expanded programming and the year-round activities, Athens Photo Festival is committed to offering a dynamic platform for exchange of ideas, artistic expression and engagement with photography in all its forms.

Exploring critical issues of our time, the Festival provides a critical context where the impact of the ever-changing visual culture can be raised and discussed. Athens, today, is the city facing the challenges for Europe. This put us in a unique position to collaborate with international artists and organisations.

The 2019 main program will take place from 13 June to 28 July 2019, at the Benaki Museum / Pireos 138. The main exhibition programme will be comprised of a curated selection of over 100 entries, selected through an international open call for submissions. At the core of the Festival, is an extensive and multi-layered program of events and initiatives, including learning and public programs, talent development initiatives, social practice, and community outreach. In addition to the main venue-based program, the Festival encourages community involvement through satellite exhibitions in various locations in the city.

bab03_a place to live Bab is a place of paper created to welcome different gazes and languages, all pointing to the landscape. This issue consisted of  an encounter between photography and writing on the common theme of the dwelling.

A dwelling is a place where one lives, where one remains, one takes a break  for a long time. A place of choice. Sometimes the destination of a long wander and a place where you decide to stop and stay. Some photographers stay in a place long enough to call it home, to whose investigation they have devoted a considerable portion of life. Others have been working hard to the constant search for their dwelling in a space that welcomes them, without clinging to a clear geography. Everyone is engaged in a long standing attempt to match the borders of this place of the soul with the fading edges of the frame, in a noble act of becoming a layout: an image, an area, a place, a landscape experience. In the end,  photography  is a dwelling in a way sense. In it both the author who has created it and the user  choose to stop, linger, finding a living space with the gaze, where to stop the spirit.

The photographers, who shared their sense of dwelling with us, answering to our call for entries, have been ninety-two from all over the world.  We have selected five of them by the advice of a panel of experts, such as Chiara Capodici and Milo Montelli, and our editorial board (Daniele Cinciripini, Marco Fava, Serena Marchionni). The result of the selection work and construction of this issue intends to present itself as a consistent patchwork of the possible visual interpretations of the sense of home, a dwelling indeed, offered to us by a young generation of artists. The differences of the individuals accepted here are the foundation of the cultural operation that ikonemi, by bab, tries to pursue. This means to move on the border of different languages, to ignore the poetics of artistic genres, to open subject matters and to interrogate its readers.

The duo Alice Caracciolo and Cemre Yesil with the project Piet [r] à, Clement Hong Yui Chan with his series about Honk Kong entitled Z-Axis, Jan Mc Cullogh with a performative  and photographic project Home Instructional Manual, the duo Barbara and Ale with Hashtag Deadsea, and finally Nicola Domaneschi and Marco Verdi, alias MounthFog, with their Flood Medication Blues.

You will also find three writers: Martina Germani Riccardi, who  have shared some of her verses here, Domitilla Pirro and Michele Orti Manara who wrote short stories for this issue. The meeting with Martina was guided by fortune, while  Domitilla and Michele’s one was made possible thanks to Leonardo’s advise from Oblique publishing house.