Triumph for Trieste Photo Days 2019

Several exhibitions of Trieste Photo Days 2019 can still be visited, but for the organizers it is already time for budgets and projects for the future, after the sensational weekend of opening on 25, 26 and 27 October 2019. Three days full of events, including exhibitions, workshops, screenings, contests, portfolio readings, meetings and book presentations, culminating in the huge crowd of super-guest Martin Parr during the inauguration of the Life’s a Beach exhibition at the Revoltella Museum.

The festival, now in its sixth edition, took place from 22 October to 10 November 2019 in a circuit of institutional exhibition venues in the Julian capital, between the Civic Museum Sartorio, the Civic Museum of Oriental Art, the aforementioned Museo Revoltella, the Veruda room, Palazzo Gopcevich (Selva room and Bazlen room), the Xenia room (main venue of the festival), the MiBACT headquarters at Palazzo Economo, ITIS – Company for personal services, DoubleRoom exhibition space, the Academy Scaglia.

“We are extremely satisfied with the results of this edition of Trieste Photo Days,” said Angelo Cucchetto, Artistic Director of the festival, during the closing press conference held at the MiBACT Regional Secretariat in Friuli Venezia Giulia. “The Martin Parr exhibition fills us with pride because together with the Municipality of Trieste, which organized it, we have brought to the city an international exhibition of a beloved artist who had been missing from Italy for a long time.” “All the exhibitions in this edition are extraordinary and those who haven’t seen them yet should fix them. The quantity and quality of the presented contents is now at the level of the great international festivals. The presence of great stars such as Martin Parr and Nick Turpin, for the first time in Trieste, has been the driving force behind the events of emerging authors and the numbers confirm that we are working well. “

Trieste Photo Days 2019 has seen almost 1,700 photos on display for over 400 photographers from all over the world, distributed among 11 institutional photographic locations, the 28 locations of the Trieste Photo Fringe circuit and the 4 locations of the Photo Days Tour in Aquileia, Cividale del Friuli , Cormòns and Trieste Airport. Altogether, an estimated 10,000 visitors in the opening week alone, including institutional exhibitions and Fringe exhibitions: almost twice as many as the entire 2018 festival period. In one weekend, the Revoltella Museum alone saw over 2,000 visitors. The partner hotels have registered more than 300 appearances during the central weekend of the festival, including foreign and Italian photographers. A success that goes beyond the numbers: enthusiastic audience, guests in love with Trieste, high level photography and various sold-out events.

In the wake of this success, Trieste Photo Days wants to come back in 2020 with a new and even more prestigious edition. The dotART association, in collaboration with the art director Angelo Cucchetto, is already working to define the program of the next festival.

“We aim to consolidate partnerships with institutions”, says Stefano Ambroset, founder of the festival, “in order to continue to propose an increasingly important exhibition able to enhance the territory. We aim to revive the winning formula of the past years: invite one or more super-guests and tie them to the jury of the URBAN Photo Award photo contest. Around their presence structure the most important events of the festival: the award ceremony of the competition, exclusive workshops, personal exhibitions and tribute exhibitions. “

Among the ambitious plans for the future, the Trieste Photo Village, a showcase in the center to reach the general public “generalist” of the curious, bringing photography into the pulsating heart of the city in a new temporary exhibition venue that would host meetings, conferences, exhibitions, a bookshop specializing in photo books, an infopoint and an educational area for workshops, courses and portfolio readings.

Claudia Colecchia, head of the Photo Library and Library of the Civic Museums of History and Art declares herself “satisfied with the outcome of the collaboration with dotART Association, further consolidated thanks to the formula that proposes a happy dialogue between the historical photography preserved in the municipal archives and that Contemporary. This is what happened in the Sala Selva of Palazzo Gopcevich where the narrative path dedicated to the Old Port from its origins to the present has seen the presence of authorial testimonies such as Marino Ierman, Eugenio Novajra and Graziano Perotti. ”
“At the Oriental Civic Museum,” continues Colecchia, “the protagonists were the disused fish markets in Tokyo (with the shots by Nicola Tanzini) and in Trieste that show human, cultural and historical values, different and transversal at the same time, to our eyes. Contemporary photography has been proposed to the Civic Museum Sartorio with the selection of contemporary authors of the Civic Museums Award while the Revoltella Museum, for the first time, hosted a tribute to Martin Parr’s photography. In Trieste, a city where the sea is an essential component of Trieste’s identity, the “Life’s a beach” exhibition documents the passion of the British photographer who, crossing the Julian borders, becomes an anthropological research of a humanity caught at the beach.”

“We are particularly happy to host this meeting at our headquarters,” said the Director of the MiBACT Regional Secretariat Roberto Cassanelli, “who gives an account of the gratifying results of Trieste Photo Days 2019 in which the Ministry for the first time is also involved cultural and tourist assets and activities. It is our intention, from the next edition, to play an even more active and proactive role. We want Palazzo Economo to enter the Festival venues and we already have some proposals in mind. For our Ministry photography is a cultural asset in all respects, it is a historical heritage and a contemporary language, an instrument of memory and understanding of reality. Supporting this event is a duty for us”.

Trieste Photo Days 2019 is promoted by the dotART cultural association, in collaboration with the Museums and Libraries Service and the Tourist Promotion Service, Cultural and Sports Events of the Municipality of Trieste, the Regional Secretariat of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and for the tourism for Friuli Venezia Giulia, with the contribution of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and the Beneficial Foundation Kathleen Foreman Casali, the main partnership of Install.Pro and Unicusano Trieste.