Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photo de Fès, Les Villes Invisibles

We are happy to announce Fantom’s new curatorial project, The Invisible Cities, for Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photo de Fès (Morocco), carried out in collaboration with Shanghai-based platform ArtHub. 

The festival, presented by the Institut Français du Maroc, is in its 8th edition and will open in the city of Fès on November 22nd

Our exhibition pays homage to Italo Calvino’s book published in 1972, still the richest reference on urban culture and its multiple meanings. The works on show stand near each other without linearity or hierarchy; they coexist in a common frame where multiple paths and plural interpretations can be traced; evoking the universal entity that is today The City, crossroad of lives and destinies, personal and collective dimensions, historical and visual stratifications. The filter of disappearance – the idea that observing, becoming familiar with a place, coincides with the very same space’s invisibility – is a feature that the experience of space shares with photography.

Organized in different venues around town, the exhibition’s photographs, projections and video-installations give photography new connotations without diluting its potential. In André Prìncipe‘s work photography brings back to life the ghosts of past people and memories. It gravitates towards individual memories in Li Mu’s images and Thomas Sauvin’s display of archives. It is strengthened by the power of collective memory in the work of Heba Amin and Raed Yassin. Photography acts as a theatre, raising its curtain on Peter SteinhauerFelicity HammondAnthony and Phillip Reed’s lyrical scenarios, that give new values to the basic elements that build a city. In Vincenzo Castella and Alessia Cargnelli’s investigations, the force of images pulls together what reality separates, as do the perspectives in the subjective documentaries of Liz HingleyCéline Villegas and André MerianRegula Bochsler’s city portraits are no less than apocalyptic. Representation is thinned down to its purely virtual dimension. With the passing of time, the technologies used to produce numerical images are more and more refined, offering ideally perfect depictions as a result: memories of a future past.  

Peter Steinhauer, White Cocoon #1, Hong Kong 2010. From the series Cocoons, 1994–2014 (Courtesy Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong)

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Li Mu, Sol Lewitt’s Untitled (Wall Structure), 2011 – ongoing

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Heba Amin, video still from Project Speak2Tweet, 2012

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Vincenzo Castella, video still from About Time, Amsterdam 2009 (Courtesy Studio La Città, Verona)

During the opening dates, a series of collateral events will be open to the public, such as curator-guided tours; a photography workshop by Fès-based photographer Omar Chennafi; talks by Céline Villegas, André Merian and Regula Bochsler.

Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie de Fès
Opening November 22nd at 6 pm 
and November 23rd from 3 pm
Until December 15th 2014

www.arthubasia.org
www.if-maroc.org/fes