Matteo Congregalli is a freelance photographer, writer and multimedia producer, with a background is in television news production and visual journalism. When it comes to photography, his focus is on social phenomena and rituals, subcultures, processes of identity formation and post-traumatic growth. His work has been featured on CNN International, VICE US, VICE News, Broadly, Huck Magazine, Esquire Italia, The New Internationalist Magazine, WU Magazine, Club Milano and other publications. After years spent in England and Sweden, he is now based in Milan, Italy.
Scandinavia's neo-Viking Revival
Over the course of the past thirty years, an increasing number of people across Scandinavia have begun looking back at their past, routinely leaving their day-to-day identities, to slip into their alternative selves and become Vikings. Today, the current neo-Viking subculture counts several thousand members, who tour the region to attend historical markets, set up encampments away from civilisation. trade goods and live surrounded by nature, when nature allows it and temperature is bearable in the Spring and Summer.
Over the course of the past thirty years, an increasing number of people across Scandinavia have begun looking back at their past, routinely leaving their day-to-day identities, to slip into their alternative selves and become Vikings. Today, the current neo-Viking subculture counts several thousand members, who tour the region to attend historical markets, set up encampments away from civilisation. trade goods and live surrounded by nature, when nature allows it and temperature is bearable in the Spring and Summer.
In winter, these
Archaeology-obsessed, mead-loving, modern-day Vikings perfect their medieval fencing skills and craft weapons, clothes and other items that are reconstructed according to archaeological findings.
From the Midnight Sun, Where the Hot Springs Blow is a documentary project exploring the emerging neo-Viking subculture as well as the relationship between reality and fiction, man and nature, history and the collective processes of identity construction and how all of that plays into the quest of the individual for a sense of belonging to a community and the search for a place in the world.
