Born in Sicily in 1984.
Studied Architecture, Modern Literature and Art History at the Università degli Studi di Catania, Italy.
In 2012 I obtained a Photography Master of Arts at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière (énsll) in Paris, France.
Between 2012 and 2016, Photography Teacher Assistant at the European School for Visual Arts (éesi) in Poitiers, France.
In 2014 I took part to the Zines of the zone nomad library tour throughout the European continent.
Currently Teacher at Université Paris VIII for the Photography and Contemporary Art MA.
Participant of the Trauma&Revival (Bozar, Pushkin and kim?) and ENGAGE (Viafarini) programmes in 2017.
I am an artist, a researcher, a photographer, a scholar, a publisher, an archaeologist. But above all this, I am a permanent stranger.

Archaeological horizon Chapter I: an army of expert diggers
Galerie Louise Michel,

Curated by Dominique Truco, text by Małgorzata Grygielewicz

Poitiers,France, September 2017

The ruins of Palmyra are an obsession for westerners. Since the eighteenth century they go there and bring back images. At beginning they were drawings, architectural plans, nowadays the technical images used to assess the archaeological site are satellite images.
Besides the images, there is plenty of travel tales, expeditions accounts, novels.
By superposing images and documents, From horizon to nadir tries to put into perspective these representations keeping in mind the recent destructions occurred on the site. Collapsing old horizontal views and contemporary vertical images: it’s a free fall.

32 plates, looping video. Variable dimensions.

Bildungsroman (to-be-finished artist book, paperback, 320 pages, offset printing, 2018)

Eduard Glaser lived all his life as a stranger. Born in to-day Czech Republic from a Jewish family, he spent his life wandering. Glaser was an astronomer, an epigraphist, an archaeologist and an expert of Judeo-Arabic culture in southern Arabia. Assuming the building method of the spolia, Bildungsroman proposes a biography made of found documents, supposed dreams, liminal texts and pop music videos that unfold along a rather tortuous line. Sometimes it becomes a hagiography of a sun worshipper. Bildungsroman traces the first part of Glaser’s life throughout his studies in Prague and Vienna, his journey by foot to Paris, his troubled time in Tunis and Alexandria before he reached his craved destination, Yemen. The so-called Arabia Felix (lat. “Happy Arabia”) has been the place where Eduard Glaser finally stopped his quest. Just to start digging.

A series of pieces sparked out of the research around Eduard Glaser’s life are scattered around. Photographs taken in Yemen probably by Glaser himself and other iconic elements essential in his path are put under glass to ape the museological behaviour in a clumsy fashion.

Arabia Felix (glass, laser print, mirror, 2018)

Congrès International des Orientalistes (isolating foam, laser prints, glass, BSD panel, 2018)

Et in arcadia ego (Third version) (glass, photographic print, BSD panel, clamps, isolating foam, 2018)

Is there a difference? (screenshot) (booklet, BSD panel, glass, blanket, laser print, 2018)

Sheeba meets Salomon (booklet, laser prints, isolating foam, wood, plywood, 2018)

Images included in Is there a difference? (screenshot) were excerpted from the feature film Khartoum (United Kingdom, 1966).

Photographs displayed in Arabia Felix and Et in arcadia ego (Third version) are courtesy of the Austrian Academy of Science, Sammlung Glaser.

Preliminary research for the book, the creation of its dummy and the artworks were carried on in 2018 in the course of the Artists in Residence programme of the Federal Chancellery and KulturKontakt Austria.

This work is an attempt to displace a sentence from its original context and test its performativity today. Uttered by Emir Feisal to T.E. Lawrence at the beginning of the so-called Arab revolt during the so-called World War I, it sounds like a premonition of a future colonised in face of the man instrumental to the very same colonisation. The to-be-colonised faces us directly, the fraudulent English adventurer does not dare to look at what he did. He seems to mumble about his contorted soul. To whom the sentence applies here and today is to be seen.

Billboards installation in the framework of the Transcultural Emancipation project curated by Ursula Maria Probst in collaboration with Kultur Kontakt Austria.

FLUC, Vienna, August 2018.

Urbs sacra

with Paweł Althamer, Anna Baumgart, Enrico Floriddia, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, Laura Gozlan, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Marwan Moujaes, Artur Żmijewski.

curated by Małgorzata Grygielewiecz and Ann Stouvenel.

Mains d’œuvres,
Paris,France, September 2017

Table&Review

video Pending / В ОЖИДАНИИ

in the framework of the Tramua&Revival Contemporary Encounters

with Anna Balázs, Dorian Batycka, Enrico Floriddia, Eugene Birman, Jure Kirbiš, Liene Pavlovska, Monika Lipšic, Norg (Nadia and Nick Degtyarev), Vitalij Strigunkov, Pjotr Zherebtsov and Marge Monko.

Workshop curated by Maija Rudovska.

kim?, Riga, july 2017

Project realised during the Encounters of Young International Photography organised by CACP Villa Pérochon, France.

with Jeannie Abert, Heriman Avy, Antoine Bruy, Rebekka Deubner, Patricia Escriche, Enrico Floriddia, Soham Gupta, Mana Kikuta and Anaïs Marion and Marion Chevalier.

Niort, April 2016.

installation based on the book Shake hands

Niort, March 2016.

with Jérôme de Vienne

Art Cella Gallery, Poitiers, June 2015.

Interactive publishing installation.

People has the possibility to edit a unique booklet starting from a large selection of images spread out on a table.
Carta bianca needs the activation of the public to exist. It questions the author figure and the photographic language at the same time.
Reproductions of some books left by visitors during the Berlin event at EXP12 follow as documentation of the installation.
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The Black Box, Mobile Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki, may 2014
EXP12 gallery, Berlin, april 2014
Siva Galerija, Zagreb, february 2014
Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, Rome, february 2014
Espace Confluences, Paris, december 2011

Everything has to disappear – typical French expression for cleareance sales

60x80cm framed black and white prints

Cinémathèque Française, Paris, January 2013

This book is a reenactment of a Mémento de nomenclature géographique published by the Republic of France in 1961.
Fifty-five years lates my only intervention is to invite the readers to tear a sheet apart and send this newy independent page to the Centre for artists’ books where they are gathered and shown.
In 2016 I published fifty-five copies, each following year I will issue one more copy.

The nine protagonists of this book are objects hosted in Wrocław. They share one thing: around Second World War they have been moved. Or stolen, forged, broken, appropriated, exploited, uprooted.
Their stories tell the History of Silesian people as well, their peregrinations, their difficulties, their shared past.
I visited every place where these stories happened, in Poland or in Ukraine or Italy. I photographed, I collected documents and testimonies: layers overlap, History gets complicated, versions contradict each other.
Immigrated pieces tells these stories in a dialogue between myself and the young city of Wrocław surrounded by her centuries-old memories.

Paperback, 310 colour pages.

Eravamo in Salento e non abbiamo visto il mare

with Silvia Cesari

artist book created in the framework of the In-Cul.Tu.Re. project.

February 2014.

Shake hands is about stock photos, the legal issues connected to them and its imaginary.

Stock photos provide a typology of images the more and more standardised. Their cheap prices and the wide possibilities of its use make them popular and widespread.
Every image is alike, they stack themselves, they get layered. Their production is industrial.

This phenomenon is under control of a complex legal system of contracts which is seldom ignored.
Shake hands tries to underline the importance of these texts written in a technical language and shown with a cryptic page layout.

In this book, the contracts are illustrated by images found in stock photos websites. This association undermines the industrial characteristics of stock photos questioning the specific and unique photographic image.

Incidentally, Shake hands rises questions about gender, ethnic and social representations that are embedded in some of this vernacular photography.

Photographs are meant to be unique: can they resist to this industrial production, to the evenness of meaning, to this overwhelming flow of images?

Shake hands
self-published
72 pages, A5
unlimited edition
2014