FREE Entry / Museum of Contemporary Photography - Italy

The Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity (DGCC) of the Ministry of Culture (MiC) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Mufoco), with the institutional collaboration of Scuderie del Quirinale and the Alinari Foundation, are promoting an Open Call for the selection of ten projects created by photographers and visual artists under 40 on the theme of the contemporary Italian landscape . For each of the ten selected projects, a transfer of works is foreseen, which will become part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Since its inception, photography has played a fundamental role in the relationship between the territory and its image, joining painting as a form of representation and soon replacing it as a privileged vehicle of diffusion. Even today, photographers and artists are key players in reading, understanding and narrating places, to the point of profoundly influencing the very idea of ​​landscape. With the exhibition Italy is a desire. Photographs, landscapes and visions 1842-2022 (June 1-September 2, 2023), organized by Scuderie del Quirinale , Alinari Foundationand Museum of Contemporary Photography intends to retrace 180 years of representation of the Italian landscape through the Alinari and Mufoco collections; with this Open Call, linked to the exhibition project from which it takes its title, the intention is to place the accent on the more open and contemporary forms of vision of the Italian landscape and on the work of the younger generations of photographers and visual artists.

The desire for Italy or Italy as desire intends to highlight the continuous tension between an extraordinary past, which saw an exceptional coincidence between nature and culture in the Italian landscape, and a more recent history, marked by tears, wild accelerations, aggressive interventions , dictated by economic development and globalization, which make the landscape complex and urge us to take a stand. Desire is therefore a concept that operates in several directions, of knowledge, documentation, storytelling, but also of projection, invention, change, starting from the same fundamental matrix of personal and collective investment.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography was born in the wake of public commissions, which since the 1980s have constituted a form of support for artistic production in Italy, a fruitful way of reading the territory and a condition for bringing photography closer to the institutions. Since its opening in 2004, the Museum has continuously promoted research and commissions on issues relating to the landscape, testified by a significant presence within the collections, in quantitative terms but also and above all for the quality of the works, for the variety and prestige of the authors represented.