18.11 - The Human-Nature Relationship

November 18th, 5 pm - 6 pm CET
BASE Milano

The climate crisis is not only ecological: it is also and above all a cultural crisis. It is not only about reducing carbon emission, but about renewing our outlook on those who live and do not share our form. This is precisely why art, and first of all the arts photography, can and must play a very important role. It is by inventing a way of observing and conceiving of the totality of living beings, by learning to grasp in their very interaction a form of art that we could change the culture and ecology of the planet together. This panel invites three of the youngest Italian photographers whose practice has confronted these instances.

Matteo Buonomo

I was born in 1991 in the northern suburbs of Milan. I’ve never had any space at home. I was forced to share my living space with my twin brother.
We slept together in the living room on the sofa bed. Personal intimacy has always been rare.
I need to go far from home and from the people I know. Far from the noise of the brakes of the bus that stops under my place.
I like to travel with no dates of return already set. I’m interested in photographing other human beings.
As a kid, I stole a wheel of a roller skate from a shop, only one, I just loved that one.
Once at home, I felt so guilty that I never stole again. I didn’t even have a pair of roller skates.
My mother left home when I was ten. I grew up without her.
I like to find the perfect pages of books. I have a great relationship with loneliness.
I grew up with my father and my brother.
I like to take the cucumbers out of cheeseburgers.
Taking photographs is an opportunity to live a life that wasnʼt supposed to be mine.
I like it when at the supermarket the cashier asks me for 82 cents for milk and I find the two spare cents at the bottom of my pocket.

Emanuele Occhipinti

Emanuele Occhipinti is an Italian documentary photographer currently based in Brighton, UK. He graduated from the Roman School of Photography and Cinema in 2012. He also attended the International Program of Photojournalism at the DMJX, Danish School of Media and Journalism. In April 2022 he was selected as one of the 15 participants of the Nikon-Noor Masterclass in Budapest. He mainly works on personal, long-term projects that are focused on social, environmental and anthropological issues. His work has been published by Il Reportage, Der Spiegel and Burn Magazine among others, and has been recognised in several awards.

Eleonora Strano

Eleonora Strano is a Franco-Italian photographer based in France. Her work explores themes such as isolation and invisibility whether it is geographical, cultural, environmental, social, political or visual. Her images are often imprinted by nostalgia, memory and time. In 2019, her work was exhibited at Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, as part of “Des marches, démarches” curated by FRAC PACA, and has been part of Jeune Création in Romainville, Circulation(s) in Paris and the 37th edition of the Festival international de mode, de photographie et d’accessoires in Hyères. She was nominated as one of the 31 women photographers to watch for in 2019 by the British Journal of Photography, one of the 250 photographers of 2020 by the PhMuseum, and has been listed as one of the 150 emerging European photographers of 2021 by GUP Magazine. Eleonora Strano is a member of Eyes on Talents, Hans Lucas, Women Photograph and Blink, and works in the South of France. In parallel to her work with the media as a photojournalist, she develops artistic projects among which is a photographic commission launched by Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, Villa Arson and Académie 5 about biocontrol. She is currently working on her next project about shipwrecks, memory and the Anthropocene in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon for which she was the recipient of the BnF grant Radioscopie de la France.

Lucrezia Testa Iannilli

Lucrezia Testa Iannilli is a photographer and performer of works in contemporary art using interdisciplinary investigation tools. In her research practices she intervenes with installations and performative cycles in decontextualising spaces, using human and animal bodies. She is currently carrying out the long-term work New Humans, an investigation into the preservation of the human being from an unusual, non-human perspective. Between 2021 and 2022 she began working on the photographic project / catalogue New Gods, the subsequent photographic action of “metaphysical” portraits following the New Humans series.

Emanuele Coccia

Emanuele Coccia is associate professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 2011. He has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Buenos Aires, Columbia NY, Harvard, Munich, Venice, Tokyo and Weimar. He is the author of Sensible Life (2010), The Life of Plants (2018), Metamorphosis (2021) and Philosophy of the Home (2023). His books are translated into several languages. He has directed animation videos such as Quercus (2019, with Formafantasma), Heaven in Matter (2021, with Faye Formisano) and Portal of Mysteries (2022, with Dotdotdot). In 2019, he contributed to the exhibition Nous les Arbres, presented at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris. He edited the catalogs of the 23rd Milan Triennale of Architecture and Design: Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries. He is writing a four-handed work on the relationship between fashion and philosophy with Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele.