Iacopo Pasqui (Florence, 1984). Specialized in Fine Art photography and documentary photography. His work explores the relationship between man-nature-landscape and social dynamics. He has won numerous prizes and competitions including “Giovane Fotografia Italiana #07” at Fotografia Europea Festival in Reggio Emilia (2019), in 2019 he was appointed among “Futures Photography Talent 2019”. He won the Leica Talent 24x36, 2011/2012, Contemporary Landscapes and Places in Transformation – Artist residency in Italy promoted by MiBACT and GAI, 2017. He is among the authors included in the volume History of Photography in Italy: From 1839 to present by G. D’Autilia, Einaudi, Torino 2012. His book 1999 has been published by Witty Kiwi in 2016. His work has been exhibited in various solo and collective exhibitions, most recently in the exhibition 1999 at the Museo MAXXI in Rome, 2017. He has taken part in artistic residencies and lectures in the University of Perugia and Teramo.
Over the next months we will showcase the finalists and winners of Verzasca Foto Festival Awards 2019. Verzasca Foto is a festival taking place in the small village of Sonogno Val Verzasca, located in the Swiss Alps, from 5th to 8th September 2019.
Here it is "N" by Iacopo Pasqui, one of the 6 photo series shortlisted for the award:
N is a work that illustrates the conflicted nature of an Italian province and the relationship between it and a section of its inhabitants, in particular the generation in their 30s. Young people with solid backgrounds and training, who have to confront (in the desperate search for a future stability) the contemporary provincial dynamics in which they are trapped, hanging in the balance of leaving or staying, of the desire for a different future and, at the same time, a desire not to give up on their country. Places in which one must live according to pre-established logic, dictated by a kind of rule from above which prescribes a “normal” existence and “standard” behaviour, a certain type of mentality: the perfect family, idyllic love, the denial of deep cultural values and the celebration of basic entertainment, and working a job without much aspiration. Yet what is normality? Like a huge black hole, this place seems to swallow us up. There is often a fine thread, at times imperceptible, between a place of belonging and its inhabitants. And what about ambition? The desire to grow for those who try just a little to break out of traditional modes of existence? The videos show the surface of apparent beauty as the dilated time of these places. The photographs instead, like x-ray images, are a way to go inside them and see what happens to the protagonists who live on the limits of a European periphery.”
Video: vimeo.com/album/5719420
