Project organized and exhibition curated by Jana Liskova with the support of Camping Villaggio Rubicone
Initiatives like the photography campaigns, censuses and residencies organized by SI FEST over the past decades bear perfect testimony to an unending desire to explore the identity of the local area and explore its changes through the medium of photography, but also and above all to continue to create conditions that favour cooperation, comparisons and exchanges of professional experience.
This year, unlike in the past, SI FEST departs from the famous Via Emilia, crosses the Rubicon and enters the area of Savignano Mare, most of which is occupied by the Camping Villaggio Rubicone (the local campsite). But it also has a sandy beach 241 metres long, which makes Savignano sul Rubicone the least sea-bathed coastal town in the whole of Italy.
So, who comes here on holiday why do they come every year? These are questions that Francesco Rucci (born in Bari in 1987) seeks to answer through a series of portraits from his dialogue with the campers. Through careful framing and by remaining faithful to the setting where he is shooting, Rucci captures the status, the looks and the daily habits of the people who decide to spend the season here.
Bartolomeo Rossi (born in Udine in 1993) develops his project within the concept of liberty and the illusion thereof. When you live in a customary and apparently protected daily space, it can happen that you do not realize the extent to which it can turn into a cage. Here we see the colours of a fairy tale, a genuine control device or one perceived as such, and the unintentional characters of a fake Truman Show making this universe totally artificial.
But what happens when the lights go out and night falls on this “recreation temple”? For Ilaria Ferrara (born in Matera in 1995), everything becomes even more nameless, fanciful, and surreal. The permanent nature of the people staying in the campground, like their stay itself, is seen solely through the presence of inanimate indices. The vivacity of the area she explores, the depiction of the bathing life that permeates it, and the obsessive search for identity become the heart of her investigation.
Being small does not mean having small fears. Childlike fears, which come from the fantasy that arises in order to offset their lack of realistic thinking, allow monsters, dragons, and poisonous spiders to hide under children’s beds. In the photographs by Alessandra Baldoni (born in Perugia in 1976) the rubbery, coloured, luminous aspect that can be seen on the campsite during the day alternates with the disturbing, worrying, monstrous side that can be seen out of the corner of one’s eye in a realm of playfulness and lightheartedness that has been deliberately constructed for children.
