“Where Future Beats”
Casello Ovest di Porta Venezia – 19-26 March 2017

Photographic exhibition presented by the LagosPhoto Festival and curated by the director and founder Azu Nwagbogu, and by Maria Pia Bernardoni curator of the festival and of the African Artists’ Foundation.

Where do we look today to understand what will happen and where we are going? The saying goes that when you are lost you should retrace your steps to find your way home again. Africa is the place where everything began, the history of humanity has its origins in this huge continent. But above all the place for inspiration for the future, to find again the energy and enthusiasm to create and be renewed. To learn, or better to learn again, how to be a community to cultivate deep and lasting interpersonal relations. To overcome the fascination for falsely innovative objects, that makes us get rid of the old ones, which work perfectly well. In Africa everything is repaired, nothing is wasted and no good idea is ever too difficult or impossible to realize. It is a land that continues to seek and reinvent its identity, finding new solutions and innovative approaches in every aspect of existence.

African artistic expression is in total tune with this creative energy and photographers are its main interpreters: by manipulating and reimagining visual language, they have given rise to an instinctive, intuitive and original photography. Like Joana Choumali, who with her refined portraits of modern and emancipated women, who have put on the traditional dress of their ancestors in front of her camera, talks to us of the invisible bonds that unite women of different generations.

David Uzuchukwu and Keyezua who, each with his personal visual language, explore the theme of identity in a globalized world, but at the same time linked to ancient traditions.

The Nigerian Logo, who shows us an unusual and lyrical Lagos with his refined images in black and white.

Joana Choumali is an Ivorian photographer who has been exploring with her work the themes of female identity, the relationship of African women with their own traditions and the struggle to find a new place in modern society. In this project she focuses on the exterior appearance of these issues: the traditional clothes.

And to finish, Osborne Macharia who amazes us with the brightly coloured and pop images of eccentric globe-trotting old age pensioners and sprightly old dandies who offer themselves as hip hop gurus in the suburbs of Nairobi.

Maria Pia Bernardoni