The University of Ghent hosts dozens of foreign researchers, students and professors. Who are these intellectual migrants and how did they get here? What do Ghent and Ghent University signify to them? How do they experience the nomadic life of an academic and what does 'home' mean while being 'abroad'?
‘Being abroad’ tries to capture the stories of academic migration in portraits and interviews with Ghent’s intellectual migrants. 
This project is a collaboration with UGentMemorie. Interviews and texts by UGentMemorie team. Click here to read them.

While waiting for the proclamation day at Sint-Lucas on Saturday 28th and after the fantastic opening of the group exhibition "Error 404: Picture not Found", I have time to publish a reportage taken in May at Sint-Lucas, Ghent. A very nice and participated workshop for children with Kristof Van Gestel, helped by the motivated and prepared teachers Lieve and Inge.  Click on the picture to see it.

Cannot you come to the expo "Error 404: Picture not found" (21-30 June, Ghent, Belgium)? What a pity! You will miss a lot, but you cannot miss the ebook version of Italians (96 pages, 61 photos) which is already available from iBookstore (click here) and Blurb Bookstore (click here).
Important note: ITALIANS EBOOK IS ONLY iOS (Apple) COMPATIBLE! That means that it will not work on devices with a different operational system, e.g. Android. Anyhow, the pdf version is available as the printed book as well here below.

Childcare department asked me to follow for some days the activity of some of their associate childcare workers, private people takeing care of groups up to 16 children at their home. Very nice experience, high motivation and a succeeded brochure, I find. Download it here. Very soon it will be online on the internetsite of the City of Ghent and printed. Meanwhile, come to see the expo Error 404: Picture Not Found (see previous post) from 21st of June.

Yes, you read it correctly, picture not found!
Where will you find it then? Here on the wordpress link.
I hope to see you on Saturday 21 June in Entrepot Fictief, Ghent.
My friends and I, students last year Photography at Sint-Lucas Academy, are waiting fo you.

The small project "The Dimming Light - House tale" is online. Click here to see it. I shot these photographs almost two months before the demolition of this house, which is going on today.
Photography as an expressive medium to build a collective memory by means of private intimate memories.

The project Being Abroad is online! Although the texts are still only in Dutch and some more pages  have to be added, you can enjoy of our work on the official page of UGentMemorie - Being Abroad project. Heart-felt thanks to my project co-partners: Ruben Mantels and Lith Lefranc. Finally, I would like also to thank Fien Danniau in the name of UGentMemorie team to support my concept!

The exhibition "Italianen" in CC Muze will open this evening.
Before leaving Gent to reach with trepidation CC Muze in Heusden-Zolder, I would like to publish this last post about the photographer Pepi Merisio born in Caravaggio (Bergamo, Lombardy) as me and whose opus I discovered meanwhile conceiving the project "Italianen".
It was more than a discover, it was a revelation! His photographic simplicity, his empathy  towards the subject, his conceiving photography as a medium for building collective memory have been the start of a revolution in my way of conceiving photography. As I got the book "Ieri in Lombardia" (Yesterday in Lombardy) I said myself: "That's what I want from my photos! I want to photograph with those eyes".

From then on I took "Ieri in Lombardia" regularly out of my bookshelf. This time I do it for posting some sentences of Pepi Merisio cited in the introductions written by Gazzaneo and Ferdinando Scianna which I find fit very well my series "Italianen". 


"Human being is relationship"
"It is fundamental that each picture conveys the ambient, the sphere: situations where people and things find, together, a precise position in time and space. Close-ups are very rare. My research is directed towards collective participations: human being is relationship".  While selecting pictures for the book I realized how my pictures were most of the time "choral" participations, collective moments as playing cards in a bar, or participating to a colelctive lunch or just smoking a cigarette on the balcon all together.

Empathy and exchange
"I don't steal photographs and at the same time I don't want to photograph poses. Photography is a direct relationship and who is at the other side of the lens has to feel happy to be photographed". I shared entirely this statement and still I do: all my subjects knew I was photographying them. Technically speaking, this statement can be reformulated as "Introduce yourself and your photoproject, then listen to your subjects, their stories, feel their emotions and then (maybe) shoot!" Photography not as stealing moments, but  building a dialog.

Collecting moments of life for building collective memory
"A camera is an extension of of sight and of mind and moments of life are what I sketch."
"Ieri in Lombardy" is a book full of life, moments of life. But most of all, full of past life, of collective memroy. His portrait of the rural culture, destroyed almost completely during the economic boom in the 60s, is pure memory. 
2012, 20 years after closing the last coal mine in Flanders, I made a portray of Italian community which is in large part composed of ex-mine workers or sons of them. I felt immediately I was on the edge of a radical transformation, as Pepi Merisio in the years 60s -70s. What is the future of the Italian community in Flanders? What is the future of all Italian organizations (ACLI, ARCI, regional organizations, etc.) so needed during the years of massive migration after WOII? 

"Photography not as denunciation, but as passion for the everyday common life"
In his portraying the decline of the rural culture, destroyed by the industrial and metropolitan culture, Pepi Merisio has never shout the scandal, has never tried to raise disdain as Gazzaneo wrote commenting the Merisio's photos. He documented, silently. I tried to do the same. "Italianen" is not a journalistic reportage, but a story or a document or even a rapsody (see previous posts) of everyday life. Moments of life which will never return again".

I hope to see you this evening in CC Muze, Heusden-Zolder.

After a post about my goal while working on Italianen, I would like now to post excerpts from the introductions written by Fabio Celsi and Pietro Magri commenting my series. Such texts provide interesting insights and different views of my project.

Rapsodic photography
"[..] Questioning that Damiano's proposal encourages to formulate, as his rapsody of images is not a documentary, but not even an allegory. It is not a casual sequence, but it has not the fast pace of a story either." (Fabio Celsi)

Artistic-document photography
"[..] In this collection two souls seem to co-exist - a documentary one and an artistic-expressive one. A style of photograpjy aiming at rendering reality in its clarity, result of the objective gaze of a reporter, is joined by a more artistic one. The latter is the expression of a subjective and poetic gaze, which is just as rich in autonomous aesthetic and expressive values as painting. [..] Right as a result of a particular historical moment, unique and irripetible, a work of art cannot become but a document. Only this way can History become the story of human beings in a process moving from universal to pztyicular, and hence indissolubly linked to the artist's story." (Pietro Domenico Magri)

The exhibition "Italianen" in CC Muze (Heusden-Zolder) will be opened in 10 days. I would like to share with you some thoughts.
One year after the first "Italianen" exhibition in Ghent, another one in the same area where the photos were taken is coming. I feel a sort of unrest wondering whether the public will identify himself in such photographs. What will they say about the photographs? Was I able to catch the peculiarity of that 50+ years old community? Such questions produce a kind of chain of thoughts and reflections about the goal of my book "Italianen", whose photographs will be the main core of the exhibition in CC Muze. During these ten days before the opening of the exhibition I will post some reflections which I hope you will find interesting and stimuating

Italianen: a document or a narrative?
When starting a project like this one the photographer has to aks himself a fundamental question: am I documenting a reality as a sort of scientist or journalist "writing" with images? Or am I rather interested in narrating a story? The answer arrived quite fast; I opted for the second way. I started the project sure of making a photobook; "the book as destination, the narrative as objective" said once Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna. He produced the best examples of narrative by means of photography, "not books of photos but books with photos". I recognized in his words the ideal of my photography and my project about Italians in Flanders found its final goal: not a social document, but a narrative where all the things were implicit, never explicit, "not a journalistic language, but an attempt of literary language". 
To be continued...